Recently I decided that I wanted a dual boot arrangement to have Vista and Linux on the same portable for use of customer sites. The range and depth of specialist linux network and security tools would me that the same machine could be used regardless of the os needed.
Mmmmm
That would assume that any of the distributions could install and configure correctly. Don’t get me wrong – I think I’ve installed every major and some minor distros of linux but I knew this one was not likely to be that easy.
The first candidate was Madriva – and this looked promising – however after the install left me without a graphical desktop. It made a good job however of repartitioning the disk leaving the Vista Business partition completely intact. A few other candidates were tried …..
The next contender was PCLinux OS which managed to give a GUI but no networking !! And the final one was Ubuntu 7.10 – which refused to run the GUI again.
The next stage involved Ubuntu since I’ve used this elsewhere without problem. Checking the forums lead me to the 64Bit AMD release but this too failed to complete installation – finally the 64 BIT Alternate CD release of 7.10 managed to complete the text only installation – but not GUI.
Important Note the Ubuntu 7.10 install appears to fail if a network / internet connection is not available.
Now I had a working linux text only installation – the next article on this focuses on getting the GUI working on this HP portable.