Abhishek Reddy — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 06:47:48 +0000

You could stick a third-party app called ext2fs or similar to read ext2 and ext3 from Windows. I don't know much more about it since I've never used it.

Running both Win and Lin on one system I found tricky. I ended up ditching Windows altogether... but that's not what you want...

Erm, do what Mark says; get another box and have fun.

mairving — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 16:46:00 +0000

XP can't read Linux, either ext2,3 or reiserfs. Linux can read and write FAT,FAT32 and can read NTFS but has problems writing to the a NTFS disk. So basically if you boot to Linux, you won't be able to write to your NTFS drives. If you boot into XP, it won't even know that the Linux drive exists. You have about 3 options;
1.) You can create a small FAT32 partition to share data files between the OS's.
2.) You can install Linux on a separate machine. Plenty of old computers lying around that will work. I have Linux running at home on an old P200 with 64M of RAM.
3.) You can install a Windows version of PHP/MySQL and Apache if all you want to do is learn PHP.

So it really depends upon what you want to do. If you just want to learn PHP, go the Windows route. If you want to learn PHP in addition to learning Linux and servers, then I would install Linux on a old machine.

openmind — Sun, 12 Oct 2003 21:49:35 +0000

I think I need to rewind!

I have XP n HD one and Mandrake on HD2. I have since found that Mandrake does not support USB cable modems but I should be able to work round that.

I mainly want to use Linux to learn PHP but I also want to use the 2nd HD it is installed as a backup disk for files. Do I just create a new partition on HD2 for the back up files as at the moment, when I boot into XP, it can't see the 2nd HD.

Confused.............

openmind — Sun, 12 Oct 2003 20:59:26 +0000

OK I just finished installing Linux but I can't seem to set up Internet Connection Sharing or find anything similar. I have a USB cable moidem and an ethernet card for the comp upstairs running win xp pro

In addition how do I change the boot loader when I first switch on? The reason why is that I want to make sure that the other users of this comp have windows xp loaded up and I get to choose. I need to put the windows option at the top as the default.

mairving — Sun, 12 Oct 2003 20:55:30 +0000

It all depends upon what you want to do with Linux. People have a tendency to start with Mandrake or Redhat, which are somewhat good for newbies (lots of eye candy). There are two branches in Linux basically, those that use it as a desktop replacement for MS and those that want to go a little deeper into the server world. Both Mandie and RH will start you off with a nice looking desktop and have very good driver support. Of course, there are other good versions like Knoppix, Gentoo, Debian, SUSE, etc. There are even versions that don't even require you to install them on the hard drive, they run off the CD-ROM.

My personal preference is Slackware. A few months ago I evaluated RH, FreeBSD to see if I should change to one that was more widely supported. RedHat to me runs very slow and requires you to take a survey every month to keep getting updates. FreeBSD is awesomely fast but I thought that it would be a little harder for others to use. So I stuck with Slack. I mostly just run Linux on servers so a pretty GUI wasn't necessary.

You can, of course, download as any of them for free and play with them. If you have questions, post back here.