Re: LUG: Dual booting tips? - Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:55:00 -0400

Subject : Re: LUG: Dual booting tips?

From : Alexander Ray <alexjray.ncsu@gmail.[redacted]>

Date : Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:55:00 -0400

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 2:52 AM, 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.

First off, I'd say that dual-booting was the answer a couple of years
ago. However now we have ample computing resources (coupled with
hardware-level virtualization tools), so its shifted over to virtual
machines. I run Ubuntu w/ 4 VM's I use for different purposes (Ubuntu
- for testing unstable stuff, Debian - for aerial robotics club
development, Win 7 - to play with , Win XP - because I need it for a
class and a device...).

> 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 tied to windows because of a device I have too. The
microcrontroller for my embedded systems class has an IDE that only
runs in 32 bit Win XP.
I run Linux Full-Time. Period. Thats just how I am. So after trying
to hack it into wine and/or reverse engineer the proprietary comms
protocol (over USB), I gave up and installed a VM.

> 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.

So here's the ticket. Its not the open source solution, but it WORKS,
and I'm happy with that. VirtualBox comes in two flavors: Open
source, and Free as in Beer proprietary. Go to the Sun site and get
the proprietary one, it allows you to hand over USB devices to the
Virtual machine.

This SAVED MY ASS in embedded systems. It allows me to hand the
usb-linked microcontroller over to the Win XP VM so i can program it
and do my homework.

> 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 do to in a way, but I still WANT Linux, so I'm not going to give
that up for some stupid requirements.

> 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.

I have less than half of ALL of that on my tiny little (low power)
laptop, and I run a Win 7 VM without complaint. it has .5/2 Gig
memory and a (dynamically expanding) 20G harddrive. VirtualBox allows
me to mount folders under my host under the guest, effectively
allowing me to access files from both (and all) of my VM's and the
host. If you're going to be doing heavy-lifting in the VM (and not
in the host) I wouldn't be afraid to give it all of the memory and
only leave ~300MB for the host.

> 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?

Virtualization is the way to go, dual booting is going away.

~Alex R