Interested in trying Linux as Dual boot setup

Good advise to get a Live CD, or better yet, if your system supports it; a Live DVD. The latter having more packages/applications to play around with.

But keep in mind, whether CD or DVD, it is slower than a HD. And a few other limitations of running from a RO partition. So don't let that keep you away.

If you do decide to install on HD, then a dual boot is fairly straightforward. You'll get a choice of boot loaders. I use Grub myself. And while I haven't used it with XP, it worked with W2K without a hitch. Whatever Windows boot menu you have (if any) will be replaced with the Grub one, which will list XP as an option.

One more note. If you're comfortable working with partitions, you might want to make your /home directory on another slice. This way, you can keep your personal data off the system partition. This may or may not be done by your particular distro. But I've found it helps if the system slice gets trashed for whatever reason. You can recreate the system and it will see your existing /home and use it. No data loss.

Of course if you're not comfortable working with partitions, then forget that last paragraph.

I do essentially the same thing with Windows. When I get a new system, I use Partition Magic to shrink the partition down to about 50% more than is already on it. I.e., if it has 10G of stuff on it out of the box, I shrink that partition down to 15G and create a second partition in the remaining space. Into that partition, I copy all my documents, music, etc and then move the "My Documents" folder over.

Now that I am dual-booting Winders & Ubuntu and the linux/ntfs drivers are working well, I create a relatively small partition (10G or so) to install Ubuntu in. After I am sure it is running fine, I simlink (ln -s /path/to/windows/documents /path/to/ubuntu/documents/. ) the existing documents folder on the second Winders partition to my home directory in Ubuntu. Any document I edit in Ubuntu is also available on the Winders side and vice-versa.

My next project is to do the same thing with a file server so any machine on the whole network has access to the same files.

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