All good information.
I am currently a fan of Jolicloud. You can install it from within Windows and then there is a dual boot on startup. Incredibly easy. The interface looks iPadish, but I far prefer it over my iPad. Plus, you can install any Linux app you want. I even successfully installed Cinelerra. Using it right now. Jolicloud claims to work on computers up to 10 years old. I am currently using it on a netbook. XP is on this netbook too, but is lousy.
Marilyn :)
P.S. Having alot of fun with Spoonflower . . . have two designs so far . . . Thanks!
On Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:26:58 -0400, Andy Figueroa wrote:
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