Any alternative to dual boot?

I want Linux to run on my computer, but I also require windows to get my school work done. Dual booting is a hassle, I know the best solution would buy a second notebook off of ebay, but I'm kind of tight on my budget.

I'm thinking about experimenting with virtual-box anyone have good results?

Any other suggestions?

 

i use virtualbox and love it. it works really well. the only problem i had with it was under vista where it would shut off my keyboard and mess with my mouse but it no longer does it. it even has 3d and 2d acceleration for windows guest (3d only for Linux guests). hell it can even be made portable with a little of configuring.

EDIT: just looked at your cpu specs the i5-560M, it has intel visualization instructions so you will get great speed inside the guests. although the ram could be a little bit of a constraint

 

It should work fairly well under Virtual Box or VMWare kinda environments except for all the fancy 3D graphics effects you see with compiz, gnome shell or similar....

More than the CPU, it is the RAM which is a big factor for virtual machines. 3 GB might work if you allocate upto a max of 1 GB for the guest, if you want to allocate more - then you might experience a few slow-downs....

 

Hopping perhaps?

Kidding aside, I really don't think that dual boot is that bad. Back around 2002 or so I dual-booted Windows XP and Mandrake for quite some time. That was using LILO too -- much more of a hassle than GRUB -- and it really wasn't too bad. Just make sure you install Windows first...

 

Before I got my M6500 I ran lots of VMs on another notebook with 3GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo. Usually it was no problem to run 2 VMs in parallel. Each of them got 1GB of RAM.

 

I don't know exactly what you mean by hassle, not to say it isn't one. But if its more a worry about messing with the MBR and stuff, perhaps it would be easier to hook up a 2nd hard drive somehow?

 

prolly a hassle when you have things open/working-on in linux, and you need to switch over to windows and lose those settings(eg web browser, chat logs...)

i'd say VirtualBox would be the way to go (but it'll kill your battery if you're mobile)

or if you only need Microsoft Office for compatibility(only reason why my laptop can't go full linux), you could try Wine. I heard the newest version makes 2007 Office work without any problem, but the version before causes 2007 to crash every now and then

 

I don't really play around with virtualization, but if I did, I'd max out my RAM.

I've done dual boots, and I don't really see the downside, assuming that disk space isn't an issue. You could even add a second HDD in the optical drive bay.

 

RAM is everything in visualization. it goes RAM, CPU, HDD/SSD IOPS. and there is a reason for that, if you over allocate your ram and you use it all you can potently lock up your computer, using to much cpu power will just make things slow and with the IOPS, but it wont crash the system. if you can run 1gb host, 1gb guest, 1gb guest2 then you ok, things will run slow but you cant open another VM with 1gb ram with out running the risk.

 

The downside is simply the inconvenience and time required to switch between different systems. Particularly if you need to do this multiple times. I found this to be a nuisance.

 

Aside from dual-booting or using virtualization, the only real option is Wubi, which is now part of the Ubuntu installer. It allows you to install Ubuntu as you would a regular Windows application. You can boot into either Windows or Ubuntu, but you don't have to deal with disk partitioning, etc. Furthermore, should you want to get rid of it, just boot into Windows and uninstall the program. It's great for trying out Ubuntu Linux.

 

I've had a Core 2 Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM and for my VM if I allocate anything more 768 MB, I'd often see swapping taking place and hence if I switch between guest and host - I'd see a lot of slow down. Using linux as host and having compiz/3d-effects enabled - made things worse in fact.

Yes RAM/CPU matter a lot. HDD/SSD shouldn't matter much unless your application really reads/writes a large amount of data. IOPS is again more of a HDD/SSD benchmark.

3GB host with 2x1GB VMs will work fine as long as you dont switch between guest(s) and the host - and if you keep doing it often - you'll notice your swap space getting used a lot...

Wubi is an easy way to try out Ubuntu as well... It has its limitations though since it is just a file loop mounted as a device - fragementation can cause some slowdowns, if the windows partition is not cleanly unmounted the previous time, you need to run chkdisk in windows and then boot Ubuntu, hibernation is not supported...

 

i can only talk about visualization from using virtualbox in windows and a few bare-bone hyper-visors i have experimented with.

i do have one contradiction though IOPS is really important, i dont know from a desktop level hyper-visor but from a bare metal one if your drives can deliver the VMs will get really bogged down as all the little tasks that OSs do in that background start to have to wait for the drive to play catchup. and this is why its usually an industry standard to host the VMs on 15000rpm SAS drives or (as of recently) on SSDs. (this is at the server level). IOPS is a benchmark but it has real world applications

Sorry OP it got a little off topic

 

Have the most used OS as the installed OS. Load up a VM software (I use virtualbox) install the secondary OS as a VM. If you choose virtualbox install guest addons and change the network to bridged and enjoy.

 

Not that you needed any more reason to virtualize but it works wonderfully. I boot ubunutu 11.04 as my main with a couple different containers. You could get a more slimed down OS to manage a lower memory usage, ie no frills. Still get the job done on your main while being able to virtualize with a little more memory.

 

Yes but it wouldnt matter for just running 1 or 2 VMs which is what I assumed the OP wanted.

If it is gonna be a bare metal hypervisor which hosts 4 or 8 or higher number of VMs like the ones for web servers usually - then you require a faster hard drive. Web servers write a lot of logs and usually would have consecutive disk activity. Things can be optimized if it is configured to have less frequent - higher buffer writes - I know many of the web server related daemons can be configured for this.

Not only that RAID (5 or 6 usually) is also used by few hosts in the hypervisor to optimize read/write times as well as provide backup mechanisms...

 

If you just need to access files over each OS, you can get a Ultrabay SATA adapter and buy a new HDD (more space) to use for virtualization, install linux on it, boot into either one, etc. If you don't mind to wait a few minutes (btw the switching of the OS), you can hibernate to disk (save your work until next time) and boot into the other OS.

 

why bother?

partition 1 - linux/ext3
partition 2 - window/NTFS
partition 3 - files/NTFS

linux partition itself requires prolly less space than windows

 

yes this is true and thats why i said it got a little of topic for the op. 1 or 2 VMs (depending on what they are running it could be more) will see no difference when it comes to HDD IOPS.

 

Im running Natty as the primary OS on a Dell Vostro 3550 with an i5-2410M @ 2.3GHz and 4GB. I use VirtualBox to run Win7 as guest and it's great. I don't need the eye candy in Win7 so I just turn all that stuff off (Start > Type in Search Bar: 'Adjust the performance and appearance of Windows' > Adjust for best performance (I use custom and leave 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' ticked)). Getting rid of all the bells and whistles helps a lot. You can optimize performance for Ubuntu as well.

These links helped me during my installation and configuration:
Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual
How to create a Windows 7 Virtual Machine with Ubuntu 11.04
How to share folders between Ubuntu and Windows running in VirtualBox
Error “Failed to access the USB subsystem”: Solution #1, Solution #2
24 bit/32 bit display message

Give VirtualBox a go.