Re: LUG: Dual booting =?UTF-8?Q?tips=3F?= - Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:19:13 -0400

Subject : Re: LUG: Dual booting =?UTF-8?Q?tips=3F?=

From : <stephen@stephenbryant.[redacted]>

Date : Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:19:13 -0400

I've got a very similar setup on my laptop -- dual booting Win7 (which I
need for work), and Slackware (which I use for everything else). Because I
do some fairly processor-intensive work on both, VMs don't work for me. The
solution I found was to use hibernate, or suspend-to-disk. I just hibernate
whichever one I'm not using and boot the other. It only takes about 20
seconds to boot, not much longer than resuming from sleep, and it
completely powers off so I have GRUB available to make the choice of which
one I want to boot. It's the best solution I've been able to find.

Stephen

On Sun, 4 Oct 2009 02:52:01 -0400, Richard Carter <rwcarter@ncsu.[redacted]>
wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I want to discuss how to dual boot. Not from a technical perspective
> of how to install partitions; I'm already quite familiar with that.
> But tips on making the most of dual booting, and keeping the annoyance
> of it to a minimum.
>
> I'm tied to Windows because of several programs - iTunes (because
> nothing in linux currently supports iPod Touch firmware 3.0+), Game
> Maker (for a class; no, Wine doesn't cut it), Visual Studio 2008 + XNA
> Game Studio, and I could probably come up with a few more if it wasn't
> 2:30am. Yet, I've been running Ubuntu almost full-time for the last
> few months.
>
> I'm at the point where my iPod hasn't been synced in weeks, I'm not
> keeping up progress with my game project, and I'm also not keeping up
> progress with Video Game Development Club related stuff (we use XNA).
> All because I like using Ubuntu, and I feel like it's a pain to switch
> into Windows for one thing and then switch back to Ubuntu.
>
> I'm not tied to Ubuntu. Firefox 3.5 runs just fine in Windows. Eclipse
> is cross-platform, as is Maple. Pidgin is in Windows (among several
> other great IM clients too). Basically, all of the things I do in
> Ubuntu can definitely be done in Windows, as far as I can tell.
>
> So with that in mind, I have a necessity for Windows but not for
> Ubuntu. If I can't smooth out the rough parts of dual booting, I will
> end up installing only Windows onto my whole hard drive, as much as I
> don't want to, just so that I actually get those things done that need
> to be done.
>
> I have a 320gb hard drive, currently partitioned like this: 200mb Win7
> boot partition, 100gb Win7 partition, 2gb swap, 200mb boot, 25gb
> Ubuntu partition, ~175gb NTFS (shared) partition. I like the shared
> partition, it's worked out really well for basically containing my
> documents and such so that I can access them on both OSes. I've also
> tried making a Win7 VM and running that whenever I need the above
> applications, but it just doesn't seem as good as actually booting
> into Windows 7.
>
> Sorry for being so verbose! Now that you know my whole story, what
> advice do you have as far as peaceful coexistence of Linux and
> Windows?
>
> Thanks,
> Richard "Ricket" Carter