I'm new to Linux and want to set up a Linux box on my home personal laptop. I already have Windows XP Pro installed on my computer but I've heard that I must partition my drive if I want to install Red Hat on the same drive and install it on that new partition. Am I correct? This way, I can choose which OS (XP or Linux) to use upon bootup. Are there any drawbacks to having 2 operating systems on one machine besides decreased hard disk space for each? Like conflicts and such? I have a 60GB drive, I'm thinking of partitioning 55 GB (for XP) to 5 GB (for Red Hat). The Red Hat will solely be for educational purposes and getting myself familiar with Linux and nothing else and I'll do everything on XP.

Secondly, I'm deciding whether to buy the Red Hat Professional Workstation or the Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS - does anyone know the exact difference between the 2? I believe they are based on the same foundation but does anyone know if the latter version is more powerful? Consider also that I will be using Red Hat as stand alone for my own learning purposes and won't be connecting to any servers or anything. But the latter one may have other perks I may not know about.

Thanks in advance.

 

I know that for alot of the versions of Red Hat that we ran at work were all free.. .but when development work started on Advanced Server that there were some licensing and support things involved...

 

I'm not sure if Red Hat is free, but the Linux kernel is free I believe and available to anyone.

Anyone else? Thanks.

EDIT - sorry, actually I think the Fedora version may be free but I wasn't considering that one.

 

We use AS where I work for our servers. We don't have any "official" linux workstations though.

This might help explain some of the differences: http://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedora/

 

I think a large part of the difference between Workstation and Enterprise is software stability, support, and perhaps licensing.

Non-Enterprise versions like Workstation are on a frequent release cycle, offer no support, and have beta software. Once the software has been deemed stable and working well, it is integrated into the Enterprise version. The Enterprise version is on a much slower release cycle, but it incorporates the thoroughly tested software from the non-Enterprise versions, and hence gives greater stability.

I'm not sure what the licensing differences might be, but they might involve the number of users and/or machines, or maybe how you distribute the installation CD.

The last release of Red Hat I personally installed was 7.3, so I don't know what the current status of all this is. Back then, the non-Enterprise versions were free. They should still be free or close to it.

It doesn't sound like you need the Enterprise version. If this is just for the purposes of learning Linux, then the non-Enterprise versions will work just fine.

There aren't any drawbacks or conflicts to having a dual boot system. It would be preferable to have your Windows XP on a FAT32 (not NTFS) file system, though. And since you're partitioning manually, be sure to create a swap partition for Red Hat.

P.S.
Do back up your important Windows XP files before attempting the install, just in case something goes awry.