posted 23 years ago
What I've done in the past is to partition some of the disk supplied with a machine (as a DOS partition), but only a small part of the total disk. On that, I'd put the linux install files. Then, I'd boot from the boot/root disks, partition the disk with linux partitions, execute setup, specify the dos partition as the install partition and then set the ball rolling. That was with Slackware, which worked fine, but wasn't the easiest to configure at the time. I suspect it has improved since then (that was a few years back). Once it's installed you can always change the dos partition to a linux one and tie that into your configuration.
I imagine your concerns about the eVectra are because it uses a custom motherboard, I'm not sure how linux would react to that, and I've not read anything in the newsgroups about linux on the eVectra. I guess it's one of those things where you may need to try it to find out... keep us posted if you do decide to try it!