Unusual installation setup - am I safe to do this?

[aguila]

Hi all,

hope you all enjoyed christmas and have the chance to relax a little before the hectics starts again.

I'm going to give away my "old" desktop box to my parents and plan to install Win XP and PCLOS Phoenix as dual boot.

Here's my plan for the installation on a single HDD with 250 GB:

1st partition:         50 GB for WinXP (primary) - NTFS
2nd partition:          2 GB for Linux Swap
3rd partition:        50 GB for PCLOS / and /home - ext4
4rd partition:            rest for Data - NTFS, mount as /data

then, in /home/myfolder under PCLOS, set hard links to /data/user1/pictures, etc. and the same for the second and third user.

In Windows, I'ld create links to replace the folders "Documents", "Pictures", etc. for each user and point to the same folders as in PCLOS.

I'm not sure yet if I can convince my parents to use PCLOS, but they only do the standard tasks, i.e. internet, writing a letter, nothing they'ld need Win for. If, by any chance, they manage to ruin the PCLOS install (which I didn't), they could at least fall back to Win (with the same applications installed) until I can come and fix it.

Would you think this setup will work or am I completely nuts to try such a thing?

Thank you for your thoughts and hints.

[T6]

seems very good selection

you can even do a smaller pclinux partition, also xp depending the apps to install and the usage your parents will give to this machine

i would say 30 for linux and 40 for xp leaving 170 gbs for the big ntfs partition  but this is only helpful if they will use lots of space on the big ntfs partition, something unlikely for 80% of users(i say this from personal experience) so the original selection of sizes is perfectly fine

"In Windows, I'ld create links to replace the folders "Documents", "Pictures", etc. for each user and point to the same folders as in PCLOS"

in this case you need to set this partition to automount in linux and also make sure to set linux to search for the documents and settings folder on the big ntfs partition, have you done this before?  set documents and settings on a secondary partition, separated from xp partition?

[aguila]

Hi T6,

thanks for your reply.

/data needs to be automounted in fstab, that's what I planned for.

As for XP, what I need to get straight is adressbook / emails for Thunderbird, but maybe I'll just let them use webmail in Firefox. On the other hand there's lots of explanations how to use Thunderbird with dual boot setups. Haven't done it before, but shouldn't be a headache.

Firefox bookmarks go to Xmarks, I love that. The best thing about it are the profiles.

The settings for XP will stay in the XP partition, the settings for PCLOS will be in /home/user on the / partition, only the personal data goes to /data, so PCLOS won't have to search for settings in the /data partition.

What should I enter as the working folder in digikam, OOo, etc.? The link in /home/myfolder or the actual folder in the /data partition? Or doesn't it matter?