NewsForge: Dual-booting W2K and SuSE 9.0 Professional

“I got a ‘new’ used PC recently to use as a test machine. I call
it “The Beast” because it’s very large and very heavy. The tower
case is huge. The Beast has a SCSI controller, which is new ground
for me. When you power it on, it searches for strangely-named
devices that cause flash-backs to the ide-scsi debates. It has a
smallish ten gigabyte IDE disk drive, an ATAPI CD-Rom, a floppy
drive, a 700mhz Pentium III, and 256 meg of RAM. It also has a
problem. It came with an operating system that has a viral nature.
No, I’m not talking about GPL licensing. I mean it came pre-loaded
with Windows, which is the official ground zero for Internet
infections.

“As luck would have it, neither my evaluation copy of Mepis
Linux nor the beta copy of Mandrake Move that I had recently
downloaded and burned on my primary desktop would boot on The
Beast. My Knoppix CD is a little dated (release 3.3), but at least
it booted. So did Phlak, the only other livecd alternative I have
available at the moment. But I wasn’t in the mood for a livecd, I
wanted a permanent Linux installation. I decided to see how SuSE
9.0 Professional would fare in a dual-boot environment on The
Beast, using the 5 CD set I had recently downloaded and
burned…”

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