Changhsu and Westly:

My personal experience has been that Linux is certainly more stable than
any of the Win9x products that I have used. That isn't to say that crash
don't happen, but the system will usually stay up. Rebooting is a rare
occurrence -- there are some systems that stay up for months at a time,
and then are only shut down to perform equipment updates. Linux is also
far safer than any MS product with regard to viruses and worms. (The
only Linux virus scanner known to me is one that is used on mail servers
to scan for Windows viruses.) And, of course, all of the current worms
are based on exploiting vulnerabilities in Windows, they are of no
concern to a Linux installation. Linux is vulnerable to other types of
hacking, however, which is why most Linux distributions include
firewalls and other security measures.

Running a dual boot Win9/Linux system is common practice, and is not
difficult to set up. Windows must be installed first, and you must have
sufficient hard drive space for Linux. I think that multiple booting
with NT and 2000 is a little bit trickier, but I don't have any first
hand knowledge. The install programs (at least those that come with
Mandrake and Red Hat), can manage the repartitioning and formatting, but
I have always used Partition Magic. I understand that third party boot
managers do work quite well, but I have always used either Lilo or Grub
that are included in the Linux installation. You will be able to access
your Windows FAT/FAT16/FAT32 files from Linux, but accessing Linux data
from Windows requires a special program. There are even several ways
that you can run Windows applications from Linux, but I do not believe
that the opposite is possible.

Learning Linux isn't easy; particularly if you've been using Windows/DOS
for a long time. There is no shortage of information about Linux
available on the web. (Sometimes I think that every Linux user spends
six hours a day posting to various lists and other sites.) You might
want to start with Drew Dunn's articles at freepctech.com/linux. CNET
has a section on Linux, as do a lot of the other sites such as Yahoo.
Take a look at some of the sites such as Redhat and Mandrake, too. When
you finally decide to take the big step, RT*M several times,
particularly the part about partitioning and formatting. Then read it
again. If you get it wrong, you can destroy your current Windows
installation. (Been there, done that).

Another gotcha is hardware. Linux is much better than it was two years
ago. For example, I did a new install of Mandrake 8.0 several weeks ago,
and all of my hardware was correctly configured from the getgo -- about
all that I had to do was tell it that my printer used 8-1/2 x 11 paper
rather than metric A4. From what I've seen on the Mandrake newbie mail
list, one big source of newbie problems are winmodems. While some of
them can be made to work with Linux, there are many that cannot. The
reason is that the manufacturers have eliminated some of the traditional
modem functions to reduce cost; those functions are downloaded to the
CPU, and require special Windows specific drivers. For various reasons,
many of these manufacturers neither offer Linux drivers, nor do they
make the necessary information available to those in the open source
community who could write the drivers.

Regards,
Carroll Grigsby



"Changhsu P. Liu" wrote:
>
> >
>>>> from Westly Montroos' post
> >But is Linux really more stable than Windows 98 SE, or
> >Windows ME? And what about Windows 2000?
> >But I shall have more question about Linux, because I
> >want to install it on a machine with Windows 98.
>
> I'm on the same boat. I heard it's not any faster than Win2K but more
> stable and secure. If I test it, I want to test its web serving, etc... Are
> there many multimedia or graphics programs running on Linux? What is the
> best source to help people who wants to get started on it? When I tried it
> last time, I was afraid that I would wipe out my current multi-boot system
> so I quit half way. If I build a new system and want to have dual boot on
> Win 2k server and Linux. Which system should I install first. I use System
> Commander 2000 on my system to switch systems...
>
> Thanks for the help,
>
> Changhsu Liu

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