[GLLUG] Setting up a dual-boot system

Andy Lee ALEE at courts.mi.gov
Fri Jun 23 13:30:56 EDT 2006


To offer an alternative idea, have you thought about virtualization? I've found that when I've had dual boot systems I always work in one, or leave one up, until it does something  to tick me off, then I switch to the other for a while. It's just not convenient to keep switching from one to the other. The suggestions others have given are the best advice to make it work and livable, but I'm moving toward VMware as an alternative.
With this set up I would install WinXP Pro as the base OS, taking the whole drive, then add the freely downloadable VMware Player, with a VMTN Virtual Appliance (or many if you feel like experimenting) for the Linux version you want. This has several benefits:
1. You don't have driver issues since the virtual devices of VMware are well supported, it handles mapping to the Windows drivers.
2. You don't have to reboot to switch OS
3. You can work in both at the same time
4. You don't get stuck with too much space for one OS and not enough for the other
5. Keep your base OS clean, and run all working OS's from VMware, and not have to worry about degradation across machines

One thing I've found though, is that this set up requires a lot of RAM, since each VM partitions off a section for itself, and leaves enough to not cripple the host OS. Fedora crawls on my laptop with 512MB ram. I wouldn't try this with less than 1GB. Fortunately, RAM's cheap these days.
VMware player info is available here: http://www.vmware.com/products/free_virtualization.html 

On 6/23/06, frank.dolinar at comcast.net <frank.dolinar at comcast.net> wrote:
> Can anyone offer some advice, suggestions, how-to information, or
> references.





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