[wplug] Question from a newbie

[bgtrio at yahoo.com]

>  Don't you just wish there was some way
> of running two operating systems on one partition...


Until RedHat 7.3, you could install the system inside of an existing dos 
partition and just use a floppy to boot into it whenever you wanted to use 
it- the linux filesystem just looked like a big file (max 2Gigabytes) from 
inside windows, but when you boot into linux the whole windows partition 
is available to you.

It may sound like that 2Gig partition size would be a limitation, but 
since you can access the whole windows partition anyway, it's no big deal.  

I successfully used this setup for a while under win98 on a work thinkpad.  
I even ran Lotus Notes with full functionality under Wine.  I don't know 
if you can use fat with WinXP, but I know you can with win2k.

Here's another idea, the Knoppix bootable cd is pretty sweet, it's based 
on debian but has much improved hardware detection.  This might suit some 
of your needs, and you don't have to do any installation with it, just 
boot from it.  Of course you'll need to save your work somewhere other 
than the (read-only) cd, but hey, if you don't want to install anything, 
you have to expect some compromises.  Insert a floppy or mount a partition 
from your hard drive in this case.

But I've been getting by without Microsoft software of any sort on any of 
my machines for almost a year now.   I feel very very good about it, and 
I've found free software replacements for pretty much everything I want 
on my machine.

Bryguy