Actually, dual-booting this laptop was not difficult. It wouldn't even have had to cost me the $50 to upgrade my Partition Magic program if I'd looked carefully in Knoppix utilities or read the web resources closer, because there's a partition-resizing program included with Knoppix.
At any rate, I shrank the 60 gB Primary partition down to 7.5 gB, and added one extended partition with several partitions inside it for data.
The first 500 mB partition was to be for Linux boot images if any needed to be below the 1024 cylinder. Turns out not to have been necessary (yet anyway).
The next 1 gB was made into a FAT32 partition for data exchange from Linux back to Windows in case I needed to do that. Linux can read NTFS partitions just fine and can write safely to FAT32.
The next 20 gB was made into an NTFS partition for Windows data (images, downloads, presentations for church, etc).
The next 5 gB is an EXT2 partition for Linux, in this case, Knoppix (Thank you, Klaus Knopper!).
Then comes a 1 gB swap partition.
And a 11 gB EXT2 "home" partition.
And a 13 gB EXT2 partition (for what I don't know at this point.)
Sizes are approximate, in case they don't add up to 60gB!
The resizing with Partition Magic did not take long. The installation of Knoppix also did not take long. Here's my lilo.conf file.
I think I only edited the comments at the end of the file (since hda6 and hda7 are not bootable) and edited the label for hda1. I decided that I wanted to use Lilo to handle the multibooting, so I installed it to the MBR.I was pleased to see that both OSes booted without incident.
Now, "without incident" is not entirely correct with Knoppix, since it didn't know quite what to do with the video setup or the modem. The messages log is available on request (ben at tde dot com). And there are a couple of other issues I will need to work on, but all in all, it was a useable install from the start.
Useable, but not ideal: the video would not fill the whole screen in graphics mode, so I started digging into the XFree 86 configuration. Learned a few things.The first thing was that only 800x600 and 640x480 were supported in the default installation. Even adding 1024x768 to the screen definitions didn't help. Still only 800x600 max.
The xf86config program did not produce any better-running configuration than the default installation one. X --configure command didn't either. (The output from either of these is also available on request.)
What worked was reading the XFree86.0.log carefully. Here's what I discovered: the video card could handle several modes, including 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. But the monitor was only 1024x768 (oops! should have looked at the sales specs closer!). So what was the problem? Looking through the GIF modes provided in the default installation XF86Config-4 file, none of them matched the list of supported card modes, except 800x600 and 640-480. So I grabbed a modeline from my Redhat installation (which is older) for 60Hz vertical, and put it in. Voila! Full screen.
Here's my XFree86Config-4 file.
Modem. I travel later this month. I have an external modem and will use it.
AGP. Error messages indicate that something isn't quite right in this area. I'll do more digging in the next weeks as I get time.
I hope these notes are helpful to others who may have bought this nice low-end laptop recently.
Ben Roe