At 01:28 AM 8/7/03 -0400, Pete Theisen wrote:

Ok, first of all, Wow! Thanks for the book! (and I mean that

appreciatively, not sarcastically)

>Red Hat 8 had dual boot, it is a good bet that RH 9 does also.

At this point, I've located the Suse Eval8.12, which will run off of CD,

and am in the process of downloading it. Thank god for FTP resume! I

figure I should have it by tonight. This will let me get my feet wet

without the scary part of having to partition.

>The dead-tree manual with it (Red Hat 8

>Bible) was no help. I emailed the author and he didn't have the answers

>either.

I went looking around both the RH and Suse websites last night, and as much

as I wanted to use RH (mostly because I know a lot of people here use it,

and I figured that would make it easier for me to leech info off of you

all), their site didn't give the warm fuzzies. The Suse site was friendly,

and geared to beginners, with plenty of obvious links to software. The RH

site wasn't friendly, and seemed more geared toward trying to get you to

buy a copy.

>I installed SuSE 8.2 and it also has failed to satisfy me. The dual boot

>defaults to Linux, not cool for someone married to the Great Satan.

I was wondering about that - as often as Big Bubba reboots ("oof! Thank

you, Bill! May I have another!), I would want the option to set the

default OS on reboot. One point against them.

>The

>worst thing about SuSE, though, is that it made the whole drive read only,

>very not cool at all. Fdisk and re-install everything "big bill" or

>otherwise. My friend installed SuSE 8.2 and had NO trouble - everything

>worked great and he loves it. His wife took to it too! Go figure.

This initially scared the crap out of me, but then I thought - hang on -

what the hell use would a read-only drive be? Why would Suse (or anyone)

do that? I figured you must of screwed something up. :-) I might, too,

though. :-(

>In addition, I tried Mandrake 9.1 and that, contrary to some reports, is

>not ready for prime time, unless you are a software genius.

Very much the same impression I got from others, as well. I'm sure the

Mandrakians sneer at those of us who use hand-holders, (much as I, in my

DOS days, sneered at Windows people), but I am doing this in my "spare"

time, and anything that gets me up and learning faster is a plus.

>Back up *everything* on removable media before you start and make sure you

>have all your old OS and old program set up media handy, including all

>drivers.

Will do, if/when I move from CD to dual boot. Thanks.

Right now, I'm in the process of downloading the live Eval Version of Suse

(lets you run from CD) and hope to be using it by tomorrow night if all

goes well. I'm also going to check out that Knoppix as well.

Thanks, all!