Question # 1: How to get Linux?

First of all the question is: How to get Linux? That’s a very easy question. Just search for Linux and you will get various distributions from where you can get a desired Linux distribution. Couple of popular Linux distributions are Ubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE, debian, Fedora, Red Hat, Knoppix and Gentoo. Depending on your taste you can download using torrent or direct download option any of these. Burn the image file (.ISO) to a CD/DVD.

Question # 2: Tough decision

Now the next important thing is the decision of keeping or removing the existing operating system, Windows or Mac. That’s a tough decision to make but I recommend not to remove it for time being because of the fact that you might or might not like Linux. Why I said that because after working so many years on Windows or Mac, you might have become habitual of doing certain things a certain way. So it will take time to get accustomed to the new OS interface.

Question # 3: What to do to keep both OS?

There are two ways you can do that.

Option 1: Use the Live CD to run Linux distribution and see how comfortable you feel with it. For that check you need to just insert the Live CD in your CD/DVD drive and reboot your system.

Make sure when you reboot you go to the Boot Menu and select booting from CD/DVD drive option. Then only Linux will be booted from the Live CD else the system will be booted with your existing OS only. This is the most important thing to remember.

To go to the Boot menu, you will have to press either F2, F8, Delete or F12 depending on the make of your system as soon as you see the first screen after reboot.

Linux will boot from the Live CD without affecting anything on your hard drive at all. This is the safest way of trying Linux on any system.

Option 2: Install Linux on your hard drive. Make sure you take back up of your important data on your system before you decide to do that.

Depending on which OS you preciously had the steps to install Linux will be different. For the most general options people might have, please stay tuned on this blog for the next posts which will highlight the steps required to install Linux with Windows XP and Vista.

Till then make yourself comfortable with whatever Linux Distribution you have. I am sure you won’t ever regret that you tried Linux, at the same time I am sure you will not run Linux from the Live CD but you will install it. But for some time you will do a dual-boot your system with Linux and Windows/Mac. For that stay tuned for the next post...

Update: (10/28/08) Read this post about how to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu.

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