Re: [school-discuss] Linux Distro Launching From MS Windows

[Andy Figueroa <figueroa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By far, the most stable approach to running Linux without messing up your
Windows XP installation is dual booting, assuming you have enough room on
your hard drive allocate space for a Linux partition.  I have done hundreds
of installations by resizing the Windows partition to make room for a Linux
partition (ext3 or ext4 file system) with without corrupting the original
partition, and this has become the normal way to install Linux on a Windows
computer for the first time.  You could easily get by with a 512 meg swap
partition and a 5 gig main partition for a robust installation of any of the
major binary distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Arch etc.  You might
actually be able to get away with as little as a 2 gig main partition, but
that would leave very little room to grow.  Sometimes, but not always, after
resizing an NTFS partition, one must run ntfsfix on the resized NTFS partition.

For partition management (resize, create, modify) I recommend Parted Magic,
another Linux distribution tailored to that task, that boots from CD and
runs entirely in RAM.  See: http://partedmagic.com/

By 384 megs of available RAM, I assume you mean 384 megs of installed RAM.
If that's the case, you will find most any Linux will run fine, and will run
circles around Windows XP as far as performance goes.  BTW, if you installed
more RAM (1 gig), you could easily install a Linux distribution in
VirtualBox.  See: https://www.virtualbox.org/  Doing so let's you run
another operating system (i.e. Linux) in a window on your Windows desktop
computer, or the other way around.

You can forget printing from Linux with your Kodak ESP-3 printer.  That is
probably true for scanning also.   For Linux printers, see:
http://openprinting.org/ (temporarily off-line).  This will give nothing but
grief.

But, all hope is not lost.  Get the Linux distribution named Puppy Linux.
http://www.puppylinux.com/  With Puppy, you can boot from a CD or USB memory
and if you desire it never needs to touch your hard drive.  But, Puppy can
also be installed as files on your hard drive.  A few years ago I ran Puppy
on a Toshiba Libretto with 32 megs of RAM.  It required some experimentation
to get that to work, but it was amazingly usable.

Good luck.
Andy Figueroa

On 10/12/11 16:10, Joel Kahn wrote:
> I'm looking for a fairly recent but *STABLE* distro that can
> be installed as a file/directory in a Microsoft Windows XP Pro
> system and then booted using a CD-ROM, DVD, or other
> removable media. I want to make sure that my current MS-Win
> setup doesn't get messed up; unfortunately, it's still required.
> Dynebolic has an in-MS install, but I don't want to mess with
> their current 3.00 beta offering--please remember that I'm
> aiming at *STABILITY* ahead of all other considerations.
> My experience so far with multi-boot configurations and the
> like doesn't give me any confidence in them. The distro needs
> to run with *high* reliability and reasonable speed on a 2.6Ghz
> Celeron and 384 MB of available system RAM. It should also
> support scanning and printing with a Kodak ESP-3 multi-function.
> In addition, I have an old Iomega 100MB Zip drive attached.
> Maybe setting this up would be good experience for some
> hot-shot high school geek, but please do *lots* of debugging
> before you tell me its ready. Thanks in advance for any help.
> 
> Joel
>