[Westwales] Linux with XP

[Pax]

The Landscape changeth!
	When I went down to the shop to buy the Mandriva kit it had turned into the Fedora 5
kit. Dim prob, I've run Red Hat, decent partition manager. Change bios to boot from cd, disk in
drive, choose language, then it tells me it can't find the cdrom. It is reading from the cdrom
and printing to the screen to tell me it can't find the cdrom, recursive or what! Why do they
do this? If I had a fiver for every time I've put a Linux boot disk into a cdrom drive for it
to tell me that it can't find the drive it is operating from I'd, I'd, I'd, well, I'd have
a lot more money than the disks cost me in the first place, but that isn't the point. Why do they
do this? This is a genuine question, does anyone know the answer? The drives appear to be moody 
too, all the machines are identical, bought by the school as a job lot, and yet some of the
drives will read a disk while others reject it. Does anybody know why this is? 
	Anyway, I guddled about in my bag of goodies and found a copy of Linex ( the Distro
from Extremadura) which did boot, and not only did it boot but it presented me with a copy
of Qtpartman (is that right?) which I think somebody mentioned works? yes? So, by the time
I've done a full day's teaching, and faffed around with the boxes it was too late to install.
I have a couple of the worst infected boxes on defrag and will go ahead with Install on Monday,
subject to any cautions warnings or advice that might appear on the group over the weekend.
	If you are thinking of offering advice, especially where Windows is concerned, please
treat me gently. I am probably coming from the opposite direction to everybody else, I have been
running Linux for ten years, whereas, before I took this job, my only experience with Windows
was a nightmare three months in 1998, that I prefer not to recall.
	Once again many thanks, the finest thing about running Linux is the way the Community
leaps to help,


Bernard