Dual Booting Linux/Win XP question

why don't you use a life cd it boot's right off the disk no need to install at all thats a great way to start.

Heh lemme reitterate something...

LEARN LINUX BEFORE TRYING LFS(Linux from Scratch

Otherwise you would be a true masochist.

Now on to your questions...

The only thing you should be able to screw up if you use common sense is your boot process, and that can be repaired by replacing the MBR. In other words have your windows installation disk handy if you need it quick, put it in and one of the options along the line will be to repair the MBR I believe(Find it before you begin just so you know where it is) That is your last ditch repair the easy way thing to get XP back.

Other than that a few suggestions... Backup everything in XP first(This step alone MAY screw something up), , defrag your HD(Very important for making the rest of this go smoothly)make sure you have plenty of room on your HD, and then resize the partition using a partition manager(NOT FDISK! It cant resize it can only delete erase and create) to allow for room for a linux distro, 10-20 gigs should be all you need depending on exactly how much you want to play with it. Once that is done, DONT screw with that partition for any reason and you should be fine(Will most likely be either hda1 or sda1, make sure you know which it is before continuing so you know what not to screw with)

Most of the time that step will go fine with a common distro these days and you wont have a problem. The only thing is you might want to make sure you dont stop the install from here on midway, just to be sure the boot manager gets loaded, this will allow you to boot into either OS. Again most of the time it wont be a big deal anyways though.

Once the above step is done and your partitions are set up, you really shouldnt ever have to worry about it again, at least as far as your XP partition, you may find you want to play with your linux partitions a bit but done correctly(Dont screw with your XP partition) there isnt much danger to your XP partition at all.

In as far as order, I would install XP first and Linux second. MS doesnt play well with others and XP overwrites the MBR(And your bootloader) so if you installed it second you would have to do a trick or three to be able to boot into linux again.

My personal advice for you though in as far as distros go, if being able to do LFS is your goal, start with Ubuntu(Preference will vary here depending on who you ask, I just tend to like Ubuntu myself), then go to Gentoo(VERY good learning distro once you get basic knowledge of linux out of the way, and an exellent stepping stone to LFS as it does a lot of the same things, just automates certain aspects at the way begining mostly and some of the compilation) then go to LFS, and stab yourself in the eyes.... Ok maybe not that last part but after all that is done I would bet at the very least you step back down to gentoo or a different distro.

In as far as programming goes... Heh learn to love Emacs(Some will tell you Vi, I love Emacs for it myself) and virtual consoles. Also look into learning CLI debuggers like gdb. You can use GUIs but once I got used to the CLI and Emacs I never looked back myself, though I dont program nearly to the extent you will.

However a side question for you. What laptop are you running? Mainly what are the main points about it as some things may not yet be supported in Linux, your best bet to tell would be to try to find it on tuxmobil.com and see what people note as not working, quite often youll find guides to get things that may have been troublesome working on there as well to help you get started.

After all that done, my last reccomendation, learn Audio and start helping projects like ReZound Ok shameless plug to try to get him more developers there Have fun above all though.

Seablade

I agree. I did the LFS thing it was alot of pain. I did it and a stable system that would do what I wanted, the hdd then failed and I moved to Gentoo. I'd start with a live CD as was mentioned and do an lspci and see what you have. Depending on your laptop some thing may not work at all or not with out some serious tweaking. Think long and hard before you commit to trying this on your main rig. It's not that it can't be done but more of a question of can yuo survive if you blow it up. It can happen. I've done it myself several times. As Seablade said post up what lappy you have and we give you more pointers.

most linux installers come with parition managers you can run right then and there before you install

Aves,

This is what I recommend. Go and download a Knoppix iso image and burn it to cdrom. Knoppix is a standalone cd bootable OS that dosen't write to the hard drives (well this is sort of a lie). You can play with the browsers and the tons of utilities. I cannot get release 3.6 to run on my XPS gen 4 but release 4.0 works quite well. This will give you the flavor of linux without screwing up your hard drive.

I have been going through the pain of having 3 bootable os's on 2 hard drives. I have sucessfully loaded JDS release 3.0, Fedora Core 4, and Xp. If you load from scratch start with windows first. seablade has already given you excellent advice.

As far as books go:

Knoppix hacks (If you decide to start off that way)
Linnux Bible. (It's a great general reference for most all Linux distros)

I like redhat Fedora Core 4 it's really simple (If you choose a permanent solution)


tattooz

By "blow up" I mean you pull an oops and mess up while resizing a partition, inadvertantly choose the wrong partition to install to, etc. Again I'm not saying it will happen but it can. As long as you have good backups go for it, but until you do I wouldn't try it. With your hardware you should be ok.

Yes is it possible, however unfortunatly I dont know exactly how to do it, but one option is called ghosting(I believe named after Norton Ghost... how Norton anything can be considered good I have yet to know However that usually happens from another hard drive, I am sure there are options out by now to do so from a DVD, I can think of one way of doing it involving a live CD with linux and dar, but I am not to familiar with backup programs myself, sorry.

Seablade

I've done it with cds and ghost before. I think that if your system has a DVD burner it should work. I just have a bootable cd with the necesarry network drivers and imige it to my NAS box.

I have ghost images of all my machines at work. It works really well for windows machines because it only backs up the data (not the whole drive) and can be imaged back to an even larger drive (just make sure it's ntfs). If i'm not mistaken the ghost boot disk is actually a free utility. You can use ghost to image to multiple cd's, dvds or hd partitions.

Linux, on the other hand, has a much better solution. All you need to do is tar your data and burn it to a dvd.
Example:

To restore you just snag a live cd and do this:

In linux you can copy system files that are being used, whereas in windows you have to boot to dos to backup system files.

Try searching google for the ghost boot utliity. You may also be able to download a trial version of ghost and snag the utility from there.