> my friend reid has had enough registry trouble with his XP laptop that > he is finally coming to me wanting help to install linux. now i'm the > sort who installs precise from the core tar.gz (why bother buy & burn > blanks? why annoy myself with installers?), so i'm thinking grab > whatever live CD may be lying around, backup XP with dd > if=partition|ssh dd, shrink that XP partition, plunk in precise core, > apt-get willy nilly, including virtualbox for his must-have XP > programs. but wait, i dunno that just any live CD can be relied upon > to shrink ntfs. this is where i'd like to hear your experiences. if > we must burn something, of course there are a million answers, but in > your opinion, what's best? i tend to be attracted to LTS knowing i > won't be forced to install again all too soon, but i feel the tempting > pull of the notion that mint may be more suited to an inveterate > windoze user, more likely to leave him happy than precise. and > there's the question of that dd backup, are there approaches you'd say > are quicker or smarter (no handy external disc here)? as for > partitioning, i'm always in favor of leaving the original in place > until the new has actually proven to obviate it. given that he's > already filled 35g of the 60g disc leaving 25g to play with, how much > would you throw to swap? which installers or others would you certify as reliable for shrinking ntfs? is it best to use winders defrag first? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120430/c600d6e1/attachment.html>