Thanks for all the great suggestions. I saw Loopy's reference for Distrowatch and made me decide on Mint 14 with Cinnamon. I do agree with Heater about using Debian since I have the PI but I decided that Mint is easier to transition to. I also thank Peter for his software list and I'll probably duplicate it.
I gave up on the dual boot since my Dell laptop won't let me make a System Repair disk which I could restore the MBR in case I wanted to remove Linux. Installing with Windows caused it to crash too. I opted to put Linux Mint on a 100GB External Drive and set my bios to boot from USB Storage Device if present.
I cannot see the reason behind why new laptops have *all four* primary partitions occupied except maybe perhaps it's a ploy to offer an obstruction to the masses who want to dual-boot. It's like the Dark Ages when the simple thing to do was to force everyone to conform to the "Universal faith" and ban them from looking elsewhere or knowing any different. Since I know that here in Oz around $130 of the laptop cost is for Microsoft it seems totally unreasonable to me that I should pay that (effectively) when I don't use it and not only doesn't it come with applications and security built-in and included at no additional cost, but it puts up barriers to going elsewhere. The sooner this monopolistic regime loses it's overbearing hold the better, concentrate on technical innovation and excellence I say rather than big boy bully practices (okay, sometimes I rant).
My advice with the Dell laptop is to just move all the recovery software to an external USB Flash drive and then boot a Linux CD to resize the primary partitions and then make that partition into 3 logical partitions with one as an =>8GB swap and one main Linux boot and one secondary Linux boot so that you can install another distro or upgrade as well. Make sure your /home is not the same as the system and also just to allow Windows to access those files make the Windows partition the home directory so that no matter which one you boot you can access your files. Admittedly I keep my home directory on a dedicated EXT4 partition as I won't entrust my files to NTFS.
BTW, I held off dual-booting an i3 laptop because the partitions were fully loaded but eventually I bit the bullet and did what I said and since then it's been a happy lappy indeed.
I just started using Ubuntu 12.04 with gnome, and made some instructions for installing simpleIDE to load spin to a quickstart http://code.google.com/p/propforth/wiki/LinuxPropforth
It says propforth but it works with any spin.
When I was running an XP virtual machine, I noticed that windows under Linux ran BETTER and seemed overall faster than a native windows install. I think this is due to Linux prevents Windows from choking itself to death, since it only gets part of the resources at any time. But maybe I'm so annoyed with windows so much these days that anything looks better.
My next task is to get my RPi to load spin on my quickstart, but so far this looks a little involved, with several (possibly contradictory) ways to go. I'm not even sure if it has worked yet. But if it does, and indicates moving to debian, I would consider this option.
Yes, and another advantage of running XP in VirtualBox is that you can maintain and transplant that environment from computer to computer as it's just one big image file.
I just installed Brad's bstc and bstl and successfully tested with a Quickstart board. Although I haven't figured out how to emulate PST from the command line yet.
Comments
I cannot see the reason behind why new laptops have *all four* primary partitions occupied except maybe perhaps it's a ploy to offer an obstruction to the masses who want to dual-boot. It's like the Dark Ages when the simple thing to do was to force everyone to conform to the "Universal faith" and ban them from looking elsewhere or knowing any different. Since I know that here in Oz around $130 of the laptop cost is for Microsoft it seems totally unreasonable to me that I should pay that (effectively) when I don't use it and not only doesn't it come with applications and security built-in and included at no additional cost, but it puts up barriers to going elsewhere. The sooner this monopolistic regime loses it's overbearing hold the better, concentrate on technical innovation and excellence I say rather than big boy bully practices (okay, sometimes I rant).
My advice with the Dell laptop is to just move all the recovery software to an external USB Flash drive and then boot a Linux CD to resize the primary partitions and then make that partition into 3 logical partitions with one as an =>8GB swap and one main Linux boot and one secondary Linux boot so that you can install another distro or upgrade as well. Make sure your /home is not the same as the system and also just to allow Windows to access those files make the Windows partition the home directory so that no matter which one you boot you can access your files. Admittedly I keep my home directory on a dedicated EXT4 partition as I won't entrust my files to NTFS.
BTW, I held off dual-booting an i3 laptop because the partitions were fully loaded but eventually I bit the bullet and did what I said and since then it's been a happy lappy indeed.
Yes, and another advantage of running XP in VirtualBox is that you can maintain and transplant that environment from computer to computer as it's just one big image file.
I like picocom for this.