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Subject : LUG: Dual booting tips?

From : Richard Carter <rwcarter@ncsu.[redacted]>

Date : Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:52:01 -0400

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

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