Pre-Installation Question for a possible Linux user

[Marke522]

I've been playing around with a Live cd of PCLinuxOS, and I think I might be almost ready to try an installation. I'm getting a new harddrive soon, one of the new Seagates with perpendicular recording, and rather than reinstall or move Windows, I was thinking of leaving my old drive alone, and installing Linux onto the new drive.

I've got 3 real questions:

If all my drives are SATA, how will I be able to create a dual boot machine? I know with SATA there is no master or slave. Will I recieve a message with a timer allowing me to choose between Windows XP or Linux? I currently have XP, and I'm not willing at this point to format that drive for more space.


Will I even need a dual boot if I get WINE or some other virtual engine allowing me to run Windows inside of Linux? Is there a way to run Windows as a program, or perhaps run other programs for Windows using WINE? My brother and I run a clan for Call of Duty 2, and I'm on the server darn near everyday. If I'm not play COD, then it's some Need for Speed game, or Supreme Commander, or who knows what, but they all seem to be "Games for Windows".


Would I be able to access all my videos and music and photos? I've got loads of images of the kids, tons of favorite songs, and lots of tv shows that I like to watch when there is nothing else worth watching. I was able to watch some of my 24 shows with Kaffine, but wasn't able to find "My Documents". Will I have to boot into safe mode and give myself permission to view my own files?


Thanks in advance for the replys. Mark.

[kilgoretrout]

1. Dual booting will be no problem. PCLOS and most modern distros automatically detect the presence of a windows install and create a boot entry for it. When you boot you will be presented with a boot selection screen allowing you to boot into windows or linux.

2. There are ways to run windows programs on linux but the free ones, eg wine, VirtualBox, etc, don't do games very well, if at all. For windows DirectX based games on linux you need to use Cedega and it's not free:

http://www.transgaming.com/products/cedega/

Some you can get to run on wine but it's a real hassle and usually beyond most newbs. Some OpenGL based games like Unreal Tournament and Quake have native linux support and run fine. Most gamers usually wind up dual booting.

3. Natively, linux has only read only support for NTFS and read/write support for FAT32, although there are tools available for writing to NTFS. You should be able to read anything on your NTFS partition, however. A windows user's My Documents folder is located in:

[mount point]/Documents and Settings/[user name]/My Documents

You should be able to watch your videos but you will probably need to install the win32 codecs after you install PCLOS. These codecs are generally not distributed on the linux install cds for legal reasons but are usually readily available on the software repos. Just search for "win32" or "codecs".