Which to install first?

[Brian Dominguez]

From: "Paul Taylor" <paul at kcnetcare.com>
Subject: Which to install first?

> I purchased a new gaming rig this week. For the first time I'd like to try
> dual booting to Windows XP Professional and either Red Hat / SuSE /
> Gentoo.
>
> Which operating system should I install first?
> I may or may not want to share files across the partitions, haven't
> decided yet or know if it's possible, which file system should I use?
>
The Linux OS makes the difference here SuSE has a windows partition shrinker
in the "buy me" version of 9.0 but as a rule of thumb install windows first
then Linux (make sure you leave free space when you install).  If you wish
to share space the easy way I would say install windows on a smaller (6 to 9
gig) NTFS partition and have a "shared" fat32 partition that will be used
with both OS's (the NTFS r/w isn't labeled experimental with the 2.6.0
kernel but I have not tested the functionality)  If you wish to access the
linux filesystem from windows you can use ltools but I am unsure about ext3
support.  it will read the ext2 from winXP. Why not just build 2 systems =)
less complicated!