Easiest way to get Linux on my desktop at home running XP

want to add linux to the works but I don't want to ditch XP - how to do it?

[jeremy goodrich]

Last night, I just got myself a new box at home ;) pretty happy about it, but the ease of the whole XP home networking (wife already had an XP home edition box) prevented me from simply going *nix (also the bit of a learning curve to set up the network...)

Now, though, I would like to add linux to my XP running box, and would like to know, what's the easiest method? Cygwin I've run before, but it's been more than a year since I had it installed / and, it lacked a bit of functionality, imho.

What I would really like is to run Apache, MySQL, Perl / PHP locally, and do more of the scripting I do on my home box without having to SSH to some server someplace to hack everything.

Which options are there, and which the easiest? Have done NO searching yet, so if there is a previous thread with some great pointers, a link would be much appreciated.

[Duckula]

Easiest way - knoppix, the epitome of live CDs.

Then, when you want a permanent solution, here is just an example [articles.linmagau.org] on how to install it to hard drive. Or just install some other distro later; they are quite easy to install nowadays.

[MonkeeSage]

Redhat 9, Mandrake 9, SuSe 8 are some of the easiest distros to learn on. Most of the admin / setup stuff is grafical, though they still have all the CLI goodies, so the curve can be as shallow (or steep) as you need it to be. Then once you get all hardcore (in your mind anyways) you can try something like Gen2 or Slackware, and then after you mess everything up, you can by back to one of the aforementioned distros and repeat the process. That's been my own experience at least. ;)

Jordan

[jamesa]

Well I did the same thing on a new machine. It has a 60GB drive which I split into two 30GB partitions. So yes I reformatted and then reinstalled XP onto one of the partitions. Then later on I installed RedHat which had no problem identifying the unformatted partition and doing it's magic, including setting it up for dual-boot.

Although I've used *nix entensively, that was my first true install. I was pretty impressed with the RedHat installer - would almost turn my grandma loose on it. That being said I'd never install Linux again after experiencing how great the FreeBSD ports system (and FreeBSD in general) is.

Also if you want Linux to see your XP partition, I believe that you need to format the XP partition as Fat32 rather than NTFS. Though I did the latter (for no good reason really); not sure of any other implications either way.

[bird]

Most likely, you don't want to reboot each time. You want a virtual machine [webmasterworld.com].

[gmiller]

I'll have to agree about FreeBSD... I kicked Linux to the curb a couple of years back and haven't regretted it.

As for NTFS, Linux (like FreeBSD) has a limited ability to access NTFS partitions, but if you're going to be moving files back and forth, you'll probably want to bite the bullet and settle for FAT32 on your Windows partitions.

Some Linux distributions now include installers that can resize your NTFS partition in order to make room for a Linux partition. If you're using NTFS, you'll need to pay attention to that when choosing a distro.