switching between vista and ubuntu

Before I get my back ordered T61 I am curious if there is a faster way to switch between os's besides restarting? I would prefer to run linux for as many apps as possible but being in college, I know it will not always be possible.

Also:

Is there a way to run vista on one monitor and linux on the other with a dual monitor configuration?

Is it easiest just to have my music on both partitions or is there an easy way to just have it saved on one partition but accessible from both?

If I ever need to delete my linux partition, will windows recognize the new space?

 

You could do what I do and run Windows natively while running Linux in a virtual machine. I use VMware Player, it's free, and so are the preconfigured VM images.

If you have a newish computer, don't play games in Linux, and want a great way to use both of your monitors then I suggest looking more into VMs.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

 

Alternatively and inversely, you can install linux and run vista in a virtual machine. That way I think you'll get more security.

However, I dual boot. I've got windows on one partition, and a shared partition where both can access. I also run windows in a virtual machine, but mainly for MS Office 2007 and internet explorer (I know it's not so good, but some sites requires internet explorer to be displayed correctly).

Virtualbox is also free, and you can create your own virtual disk images.

And also, you could get wine or crossover to run windows applications natively in linux. That may or may not work for certain applications, and not everything is supported.

 

Or you could do what I'm doing now, run Linux only, and if I need to run a Windows specific app, then I'll just use another computer. Either a friend's computer, a computer at work, or a computer in one of the computer labs.

In the past school year since I've switched to Linux, I've made sure to keep either a Windows partition or VM around in case I needed it, and I only ended up using it a handful of times for a single class. I probably could've gotten around using it if I really wanted to as well, it just didn't seem worth the effort (it simply would have required manually renaming a bunch of java applet files to match the casing they were coded with, Windows didn't complain since it's case insensitive).

 

I have a feeling I will be using linux mostly as well just because I shouldnt be doing too much more for school then typing papers.

I like the idea of the shared partition for my music in order to save some space. How do I go about doing that? Will it work with itunes for windows and say rhythmbox for ubuntu? I think I will just dual boot and research more into using a vm

 

Just use fat32 or ext2/3 and you can get access from the other OS. Unfortunately the state of fs drivers in Vista kind of sucks right now, so you're better off using fat or XP. Keep in mind, Windows filesystems have a lot of illegal characters that Linux filesystems are just fine with.

If you have an old desktop around, I'd just throw in a nice sized hard drive and use it for network storage. Or get one of these inexpensive NAS boxes, something like this. Not that I'm endorsing that product, it just looks pretty decent at first glance, and Buffalo generally makes pretty good stuff.

 

atyrell, if you're just going to do typing then OpenOffice should be fine.

For the partitioning thing, I installed windows XP first. At the setup screen, I only allocated about 25GB or so for the system (out of 100GB total hard drive space). I created another partition of 50GB for the shared stuff. I left 25GB unpartitioned so that I could do it from the Ubuntu installer. I've got the win25GB and the shared50GB both as NTFS and the Ubuntu25GB as Reiserfs. As for the iTunes and Rhythmbox sharing the same drive, I don't see why not.

 

The only way I know of for running both Linux and Windows XP at the same time is to use coLinux (the easiest way to do this is to install andLinux). Then you are truly running both at the same time. Might be a little slow for graphics-intensive stuff, but other than that, it works quite well. I have it installed on my laptop, because there's no known way in the universe to get its wireless working in Linux.

 

i will be using vista and ubuntu. All I really need a shared drive for is for my music. is there any easier way to do it if that is all i need it for?

 

Linux shouldn't have problems reading music from your NTFS drives, I have been doing that for some time myself. Ubuntu should have your Windows partition auto-mounted. Now, writing on NTFS drives from Linux is still a young technology, though...

 

Yeah, ntfs-3g is just about there, but I have had a couple minor corruptions very recently. FAT is still probably the best option when using Vista, if you want to write from both operating systems. I haven't been able to get any of the ext3 drivers to work in Vista, but I've only tried 64bit which demands signed drivers.

 

you can run this crappy software on Linux, check this:

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

 

i know little to none about these file formats. Isnt NTFS the newer format for vista? What is vista by default?

If it is NTFS will I lose much performance buy using FAT32? Can I switch to NTFS later when linux is more intune with it?

In order to get ubuntu to and vista to share music does all my music have to be in a shared partition? If so how is this created?

Sorry for so many questions

 

NTFS is the filesystem since XP. You can access from Linux to it (read and write). However Zindows won't recognize your linux partitions which uses the filesystem ext3. If you wan't to share data in both way you should create a FAT32 partition, on Zindows you have a tool like partition magic which is really easy to use.

 

I guess you never heard of Ext2 IFS.

I can easily share from all three of my OSes. XP(NTFS), Vista(NTFS) and Ubuntu(ext3).

 

no I didn't know about that, I'm surprised Winblows can read Linux FS, though I never had the problem I use only Linux.

 

so if I have a vista partition that uses the ntfs file system....and the other partition is linux....then while in linux i can access my music on my vista partition? So I will not need to do anything special for this to happen?

If this is not the case how do I creat a shared drive for my music? any good tutorials?

also, which os should I install first to make things easier?

 

I use Ext2 IFS, but my gripe with it is that when Windows doesn't shut down properly (which happens a lot), it doesn't cleanly unmount the Linux partition (or it doesn't unmount at all), which corrupts the filesystem, forcing fschck when trying to boot into Linux. Also, before Ext2 IFS, I was able to hibernate one operating system and boot into the other while having both states completely intact; I can't do that with Ext2 IFS installed. I've seriously been considering just uninstalling it.

 

No for the first question Linux can easily read the music on the ntfs partition

The windows OS should be installed first

 

For me I've found that if I allow linux to access my windows system partition directly, my windows will get really slow up start up. I'm not really sure if the linux access is really the problem with it, but this time around I didn't allow linux access to the windows system partition; ubuntu only sees the shared NTFS partition. So far no problem.

Someone mentioned IEs4Linux. I haven't tried that, but is there a difference in performance between IEs from there and IEs installed through wine or crossover?

 

SO i really dont need to worry at all about creating a shared drive since linux will just recognize whats on my vista partition? This seems to easy to be true

 

it is that easy

ohh and ceminino are you suffering from some sort of disease that makes it impossible for you to spell windows correctly or are you just stupid?

 

atyrrell, the only "too easy to be true" bit is that ubuntu by default doesn't write to ntfs, only reads it; if that's all the functionality you require, then it's simply "too easy"

 

I see. So how do I make it so I can save files with linux and recognize them in vista?

 

You will need to install the ntfs-config package. It's in the Add/Remove manager. Just search for ntfs, with all repositories enabled.