[Ham-Computers] Not Too stupid to dual-boot

[jeff]

Dave 'Doc' Corio wrote:
>    That has to be the best reply I ever received!
> 
>    My goal was to have a dual-boot PC with the resident Windows OS on 
> the master drive, while using the second drive as a LINUX boot drive and 
> as backup storage for the primary drive. Will the SATA enclosure through 
> the USB port allow me to do this?

The trick here is that you can put linux anywhere, but the actual 
BOOTing takes place on the boot drive, in the boot partition.




> have used an enclosure on and saved all this trouble. That's what I get 
> for "assuming" the new drive would work!

after coming from IDE, it's not hard to assume exactly what you did.



Congrats on your desire to install (what I consider) a superior OS.
I don't know if you have any experience with linux or what you're 
looking for, but there are any number of ways of going about trying them 
out.

If you don't want to play Hard Drive Roundabout, you can run almost any 
distribution on a live cd.  You dl the ISO, burn to cd (or DVD), boot to 
cd, and use the OS all you want.  It doesn't mess with your data.

You can also try running them as virtual machines under the free vmware 
player.  You'll pay a performance penalty, but they'll run just fine. 
There are prebuilt vm's or you can simply make them yourself by booting 
into the ISO image inside vmplayer (lots of web pages cover this).

Oh yeah, you can run vm's under Windows or linux, so you don't need 
additional space.  Macs too, but I have no experience with them.  I 
started with a laptop running XP, shrunk the XP partition, created a new 
partition, and installed linux on it.  All with free software (download 
Clonezilla/Parted live disk).

I have something like 2-3 years with linux and have tried a few distros. 
  I was very pleasantly surprised by Ubuntu (7.04 - latest).  It did an 
incredible job of finding 99% of my hardware (WPA with wireless is a 
PITA) and it seems `almost ready for prime time'.  It even mounts USB 
drives by itself out of the box.  It set up a boot menu for me, even 
including an entry for the Redmond Menace, which I already had on the drive.

Ubuntu comes in a number of flavors currently, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, 
and Ubuntu.  The primary difference seems to be the graphical interface. 
  Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop, which is full of eye candy and uses a 
lot of resources.  Xubuntu is described as a light version, which uses 
the XFCE desktop, a considerably less pretty but 100% functional desktop 
(I use it by choice).  Regular Ubuntu comes with the Gnome desktop )(I 
think it's in the middle, resourcewise).

Regardless, you can install all 3 desktops if you want to, and switch 
between them at logon (after boot).

Whatever you try - good luck.  Let me know how you like it and if you 
have any questions.

I highly recommend having another pc next to you, with net access, while 
you're installing or using linux.  You'll need it if you run into any 
problems or need to do research (everyone does).




-=-=-
... I'm not a tube snob, I'm a Thermionic Elitist
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