Need help installing Gentoo

[Psynotic]

Hey guys,

I have been very interested in Linux for a long time and now I am going to try to install Gentoo. Currenty I have a 120gb HD with Windows XP under the NTFS partition. My family needs Windows so I was wondering how I could multiboot Gentoo. Would I have to partition my drive via Partition Magic and install gentoo on the new partition? Quit frankly I am in the dark when it comes to Linux so I was wondering if anyone could give me some tips. Thanks!

[Determined]

First things first congrats to you for choosing gentoo. It has features that all sorts of people have latched on to including myself. All of my computers are wondering what the hell happened I went from having 4 or 5 distros all around to having just the one.

Anyway if you already have an empty partition on your drive, or perhaps another drive you could easily install Linux on that drive or partition and configure a dual boot system.

I have never resized any partitions using Partition Magic and would not recommend that anyone do it, although I am not saying that I would recommend that you not do it. My only point is that in my current situation there is no need to keep the installation I have now over reinstalling it If indeed I don't have another hard drive or empty space on the current one.

I do realize that when other people use your computer that the story is different, but I am assuming that since you have windows XP and you are thinking about learning Linux, that you probably could manage backing up the files on the computer and restoring it to its origianal or better yet an enhanced state of fresh-installdom (which always seems to be the only time windows performs flawlessly) but anyway.

After you have free space in your computer and windows xp is installed and working properly (make sure that windows has no problems booting or anything like that before you continue and attribute a problem that windows has with Linux instaid of a hard drive configuration) boot up your gentoo live cd and continue reading the installation docs online to configure your Linux partitions, set up networking and all of that fun stuff. The documentation has very precise direction on how to properly configure your computer to boot into multiple operating systems and even better than that, the boot-loader which handles this task does a very good job at sensing what you have and adding the configuration for you.

One recommendation that I have about partitions in the windows side is this; give windows about 20 GB or less and make another partition that is FAT not NTFS that is 80gb. Then you will have another 20GB for linux and you can put all of your backup data on the FAT drive. This means that if windows or gentoo happens to crash you can reinstall either of them with no real side effects to the other installation or to the backup data. If you do install windows xp after you install linux it will take over you computer and you will have seemingly lost your lnux setup, but really you just need to rewrite the boot sector with grubs information, or add linux to the ntbootloader.

The only way to get it done is to start so take a hack at it and you will be presented with your next question to ask.

I really think that gentoo is one of the easiest to install and maintain, and at the same time you get the benefit of doing things the right way which is better performance from the applications.

Good Luck!
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-Determined

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