Monday, March 07, 2011

Looking to dual boot the laptop

I am still checking out the various Linux distributions for making my laptop into a dual boot machine.  I am running Windows 7 (64 bit) and I am wanting a Linux distro that is also 64 bit so it will take advantage of all of my memory.  I had PCLinux on the machine before, but, it is a 32 bit version and was limited to 2 gigs of memory (I have 4).  I want dual boot as I still have software (taxes) that is Windows only.

I have tried a lot of distros and a few of them either won't boot (kernel panic or graphic lookup) and they are automatically out of the running.  I want something that works right out of the box without me having to manually edit config files.  Part of the distros also now support my wireless network card and that is a huge bonus.  The only thing I cannot see on the 'install' options are how do you set up the partition so that the current windows is still there, but, I can carve a portion out for Linux.  If anyone has a good and simple instruction for this it would be appreciated.  I really want Linux back on my machine so I can get back to using my machine rather than borrow my wife's machine for mail and photo editing.  Once that get stable I will then convert my daughter's machine to dual boot so that we all have Linux up and running.