Just wanted to log my first experiences building both Windows and Linux on a single machine. (Actually, I used two machines, but each had both operating systems. One was too slow, so I've moved to a slightly less-slow machine.)
• First try was building on an old, incredibly slow Dell box.
• Successfully installed Windows XP Professional on the first partition.
• Got Windows authenticating and doing roaming profiles from a Mac Server.
• Installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on the second partition.
• Realized I didn't have enough RAM to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and couldn't get the NIC working. (Related problems?)
• Moved up to a generic GCS box with more RAM.
• Reinstalled Windows XP Pro. Good.
• Decided to go with Fedora Core 3 this time.
• Downloaded and checksummed FC3, and burnt to CD.
• Checked FC3 media. All good.
• Partitioned and Installed FC3 on the new box. Installed as much software as I thought I'd need/want/be able to get away with. This was trial and error as I've never done this before.
• Booted into FC3 and went to up2date. up2date complained about not having enough free space on the drive.
• Turned out OpenOffice, with all languages, installed straight from the FC3 CD, was hogging all my disk space. It was about 1GB. (Again, I'm new here.)
• Removed OpenOffice (I'm told I can install it from the download, sans languages, and it will be more like 100 MB.)
• Retried up2date. First try got an error message that I'd been disconnected. Second try worked! All up to date now.
I'm tired now, and am taking a break from non-Mac systems for a bit. I'll post more when I get back into it, either in this post, or in another. I haven't decided yet.
UPDATE:
Logged in to my Linux partition today, and up2date told to me there were new updates. (Just like on the Mac!) Ran the updater. Couple little things and a kernel update. Installed the updates, rebooted. Bam! Kernel panic! (Just like on the Mac.) Weird thing was, I rebooted and, at the boot prompt I had my choice of kernels to boot. Choosing the old kernel lets me boot the system. Choosing the new kernel gives me kernel panics every time.