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« on: October 23, 2009, 02:54:04 am »
Hey guys--
Been a while since I've done this so I have some questions and am looking for some advice.
My laptop is an HP G60-235DX. I run WinVista on my laptop right now. I hate it. Everything about it.
As such, I want to reformat my computer, but when I do so I have three options I can think of really:
1. Just Linux
2. Just Windows XP
3. WinXP+Linux
[I know everyone thinks Win7 is amazing. I honestly have no need for something that intensive on a laptop that already gets poor battery life just from being 16", so I will avoid that).
I'm leaning toward option 3 because I used to really enjoy using Linux, but haven't been doing so much until I started to get back into Linux at my job. I want to use Slackware, but I don't know much about how it would be compatible with my hardware nor do I know how to check -- it's crucial that it supports at the minimum all of my USB ports and my NIC and integrated Atheros wireless controller, and my Intel video card, and my headphone jack, as I absolutely NEED those for any sort of productivity on my university campus. An additional benefit would be the ability to use my integrated webcam on Linux, as well, but this isn't an undying concern.
WinXP I can figure out just by checking with HP, but I don't know how to check to see if they will support my HDMI port or any of my other software--I"m thinking of the vendor site but if anyone happens to know other resources that would be ncie too. I don't want to end up having installed XP to find nothing works and has no drivers anywhere and be left up shit creek.
Lastly, I need a general storage partition such that I can access it from either WinXP or Slackware so that I can share documents between the two. Are there going to be issues associated with doing this? For example, would Slackware look at a file "John.doc" and format it with different specifications or change its metadata such that "John.doc" is no longer usable on WinXP? What filesystem would I need to make this swap partition? How big should my partitions be in general? I have a 300gb hard drive and have give or take 150gb of movies/music/documents that I would almost need to be able to access from either Slack or XP.
Lastly lasty, would Slack be the Linux choice you recommend? I'm not a bash expert, but I'm not afraid to learn commands as I end up needing them, providing the documentation is adequate. I've also started attempting to edit an fstab for network mounting in Ubuntu for work, so I'm not afraid to try and script for bash either.
Thanks a bunch guys!