Question for Dual-Booters...

[jayson.rowe]

OK, a little background first - I haven't really played w/ linux for YEARS - in fact since before Ubuntu/Kubuntu exsisted. I dabbled with Mandrake 9, Red Hat 9, Yoper, and some other distros in a dual boot setup, but ALWAYS went back to Windows full time.

I have always WANTED linux to work for me - but I never could make it happen. Well, I've heard Ubuntu out of the yingyang for months now, and I had to give it a try - went Kubuntu since I've never really liked Gnome (actually I loaded Ubuntu first, and realized I STILL don't like Gnome)...

I love it - I've only booted into my Windows install to play games. I was wondering if most of you dabble with Kubuntu as a hobby and boot back into windows to do something serious, so do you mostly run Kubuntu like I'm doing now.

I have Windows on one drive, Kubuntu on another, and I have a seperate Data partition that both OSes can access - so everything works pretty seamless for me.

[dibl]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

I started out cautious, like you, with Kubuntu Dapper last year. I have one Windows app that is critical to my genealogy hobby, and it is a stinker (TMG, built on MS Visual Foxpro) --- I wasted a week trying to get it to run under Wine. However, with help from this forum (actually a member of this forum) I have the free VMWare Player working as a virtual machine to run WinXP, and that is an excellent solution. Consequently, I haven't booted Windows in 6 weeks, at least -- no need to.

Also, little USB devices were a pain with (K)Ubuntu, up until Edgy and Feisty. Most of the common ones seem to "just work" now in Feisty.

So, the next time I get into the mood to install Linux, I don't think I'm going to bother with a Win partition at all. 8)

EDIT: Depending on your motherboard, you might need a little Win partition for BIOS-flashing, overclocking, and stuff like that. I got an Intel mobo and they provide a Linux flash tool.

[MepisReign]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

I kissed Window$ goodbye around 1 year ago. Never installed it again....and I play my favorite game (Enemy Territory), encode movies from avi to DVD (Tovid), download stuff and all the regular usage just running Kubuntu.
Needless to say that now I have piece of mind and I can do with my OS whatever I want/need to.
No Dual Boot here....

Sorry for breaking into your post since I have no dual boot on any of my computers

MepisReign

[jayson.rowe]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

Oh that's find Mepis - I'm looking for all sides

My two games I play all the time are CS:Source and Battlefield 2...

Doing research, it seems those 2 aren't really playable under wine, or transgamings solutions...

[javierrivera]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

I make a very slow transition, 6 or 7 years ago.

I'd been playing with linux since the middle 90s (yes, I'm old), but I had never stayed with it. I did some little development work with COBOL on SCO Xenix in the late 90s, it gives me a I had a good grasp of pure unix (I had never booted X in SCO).

Linux come into into my life after my work mail server crashed loosing all account info (again). Searching for some solution I build a sendmail server under Red hat 7.0.

The box was there silently working for a couple of years. Slowly most of the net related tasks were assigned to it (DNS, DHCP, router, firewall) as it was reliable.

Someday I realize that I did expend a significant amount of my time working on linux and that I need another linux machine to make tests. So I explore all the posibilities that I had to run windows and linux in my machine.

I found that the best solution in that time was Win4lin. It runs a near perfect windows virtual machine (much faster that any actual solution) under linux, but only win 9x. Then I made the change.

And now here I am. Now most of my work is done in Linux but I still do a lot of Windows work, usually mixing remote access, VirtualBox and Wine.

At least, my home computer is 100% linux.

Javier.

[Detonate]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

I built the machine I'm using now about 4 months ago. It has never had any MS software of any kind on it. I can do everything I want to do. Every once in awhile, I hit a web site that's not friendly. I just go somewhere else. Very little on the web that is not duplicated many times at other sites. I don't wish to become a serious "gamer" so that's not a problem for me. Gimp works fine for my pictures, I'm not a pro photographer. Haven't run across the multimedia file yet that won't work, but that doesn't mean that there are none. Getting Samba up and running was somewhat difficult, but I have done it so many times before with other distributions that I figured it out fairly quickly.

I am currently dual booting to Kubuntu Feisty and PCLinuxOS-2007. Trying to see which one to recommend to my less savvy friends. So far, Kubuntu is winning. PCLinuxOS comes with a lot of stuff preinstalled, but for some reason it runs very slow on my computer.

[dibl]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

Getting Samba up and running was somewhat difficult

Yep - That reminds me, Samba is a great way to do file-sharing on a single Linux system, between your VMWare "virtual Windows" and your real Linux filesystem. In other words, you can skip the FAT32, FS-Drive, and other "tricks" for file sharing on dual-boot system, and have an all-Linux system that uses VMWare Player to run Windows apps, and Samba sees it as a different computer, and provides a capability to share files between the real Linux system and the virtual Windows system.

Pretty cool! 8)

[Detonate]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

Let me add, that I highly recommend having at least two Linux OS's installed on any computer, even if one of them is a on a very small partition with a minimum installation. Have both systems mount the file system of the other. I always use ext3 on all distros to make this easier. That way, when you screw up a file, and can't boot your system, you can always boot to the other system to easily restore your backup file, or edit a file. That's instead of frantically looking for that live CD you misplaced.

This has saved me more times than I can count because I am a tinkerer.

In fact, tomorrow I'm going to wipe PCLinuxOS-2007 and replace it with Gutsy. I'll keep Fiesty running until Gutsy goes final, and a little beyond that to be sure everything is stable.

[dibl]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

I highly recommend having at least two Linux OS's installed on any computer

This is very wise advice, indeed.

Personally, I have 3 Linuces and one WinXP OS installation -- I guess I'm running a "quad boot" system -- your data can never be too secure! But next time I need to install an OS, Windows is going out the window.

[askrieger]

Re: Question for Dual-Booters...

Ah, but which other distro would I want?