On Sunday 03 October 2004 04:14 pm, John N. Alegre wrote:
OK ... If this where a single boot Linux box I would not hesitate to just through SuSE on the machine but here is what I am facing.
I have a IBM think pad that is configured as a dual boot Linux / Windoze system. The only reason Windoze is on there is at times when I need it at client sites, I don't use it myself. Since Red Hat has dropped free iso distribution, I have decided if I am going to pay for Linux I am going to use SuSE which is IMHO a far superior product the Red Hat Enterprise.
Now back to the issues.
As i said the laptop is a dual boot Linux / Windoze system with GRUB as the boot loader. All works fine now and my inclination is to leave things as they are. However the Red Hat 9.0 that is on there is getting farther and farther away from current.
My main concerns with laying SuSE 9.1 Pro over the Red Hat distribution that is on there are two....
First overwriting of the MBR and losing GRUB and there by not being able to boot Windoze, and second getting the XFree86 to come up. Once I get there configuring the rest of SuSE is no problem. I did have had the problem of the MBR overwrite happen on an old Red Hat 6.x install. I don't remember how I fixed it but I remember it was hell
Anyone have any experience here?? For completness the laptop is an IBM 600 series with a 12 gig HD and 328 MB RAM
SuSE 9.1 uses grub as well. I am fairly sure the SuSE install will recognize the Windows partition and include it in the grub boot menu, but not 100% sure. You could go through the install process and watch carefully. SuSE should tell you what it intends to do. If you don't like what you see, you will be able to abort before anything is done to your system. Actually, SuSE presents a list of what it intends to do at the very beginning. You get to select from the list to make changes to each item. This is a little different from other Linux install systems where you are led through a step-by-step process. With SuSE, everything is laid out for you at once and you can pick and choose what you want to change until you get everything the way you want it then press the "go" (or whatever it's called) button. -- Robert C. Paulsen, Jr. robert@paulsenonline.net