Regarding installing Debian on a Win98 machine... If you have enough free space on your Windows drive you can use a partition resizing tool like GNU parted to resize your fat partition, then add in the necessary Linux partitions. (There are several filesystems you can choose from to install Linux on, the most common are ext2, ext3 and reiserfs).
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/ Resizing a filesystem full of data you actually use is not a step to be taken lightly. Do a full low-level backup before you do this. A non-free tool which does a good job is Norton Ghost. I recently resized a bunch of partitions on my laptop. I had nine partitions with fat for windows, ext2 for Linux as well as a linux swap partition, and BeOS BFS. I didn't expect parted to be able to resize BFS but I was surprised it couldn't move it. It had no problem with the fat partitions. Unfortunately it scragged by Linux root partition and I'm going to have to reinitialize and reinstall Linux on that machine. I also got a couple of segmentation violations when using parted. Alternatively, you can install Linux directly into your Windows FAT partition using umsdos. I don't know much about it but it's an option that's been around a long time. I don't think the Debian installer supports it but you could make custom boot floppies to set it up the umsdos and then run the Debian installer afterwards, skipping the steps to format your partitions. This will work but will likely be slower and may be less reliable. But it's probably the easiest to back out of. The best recommendation is to install a second hard drive. Of course that won't work if you're installing to a laptop. When you complete your installation, you will install a bootloader, normally this is lilo but you can later choose GNU grub. Either of them is capable of booting Linux off the second hard drive. Windows 98 has to be on the first partition of your first hard drive but most other OSes can load from elsewhere. I've got two drives in my desktop PC with Windows 98, NT4, 2000, Slackware and BeOS 5 Pro. It works great. Another option is if you get a second hard drive, to use SCSI drives. If you use SCSI at all, it is probably best to have an all-SCSI system. The BIOSes of most bootable SCSI host bus adapters let you select which drive to use as the "BIOS C: drive". This allows you to boot off of up to fifteen different hard drives, which each may have their own boot loader, so you don't have to touch the Windows Master Boot Record at all. Regards, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
