Setting up dual-booting on an Athlon64 machine

Hello,

Please forgive my newbie question. I'm new to the LINUX world.

I'm purchasing an Athlon 64 X2 machine with Windows XP Media Center 2005 (32-bit) installed.

I'd like to set it up to dual boot with 64-bit Linux Could anyone recommend how to do so and what flavor of Linux would be best? I'll be using Linux largely for doing numerical work.

Thanks for your help,
Grandpa

 

what do you mean by numerical work?

 

Factoring large numbers and that sort of thing, using the gmp library (for large-integer math).

 

This should be interesting for you: http://www.howtoforge.com/windows_linux_dual_boot

If you want to run a desktop, I'd recommend Ubuntu. If you want to use the system as a server, you should use Debian. Fedora's also not bad (for both purposes).

 

Thanks Falko, I'll check this out.