dual boot wisdom please

slap ed

slap ed

slap ed

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hi guy's
after not being that impressed with vista , i have decided too try a dual boot system with ubuntu and xp home 32 bit on my old rig . this will be a fresh install off both os's . and i would like a little guidance if possible please guys .
first which os would you install first and why ?
and second my main reason for trying linux is i believe it is possible to play il2 1946 online in hyperlobby on linux running wine ? anybody else in here managed to do this ? any info would be very much appreciated .
 
Never had much luck with wine.

But....

Install windows first.

Why?

Linux sees windows and adds it to it's bootloader for you.
Windows will just destroy ubuntu's bootloader and you'll have to re-install it manually, it's not really difficult, but it's an extra hoop you could do without jumping through if you're just starting out.
 
Oh, that's a good point.
Use a partitioning tool to either lay out the partitions they way you want them for Linux, or at least create a big lump of unpartitioned space for the installer to create partitions in.

Things have probably moved on, but there can, on rare ocassions, be the odd hiccup with some of the Gui Linux installers when they resize windows partitions. It's not at all likely, but better safe than annoyed ;)
 
depending on the hard drive you will need 1000mb of swap space and 40% of your harddrive space for linux (depending on where you want to save most files)
 
What I do:
Boot Linux Live CD
Run Gparted (or some other partion tool that comes on your Live CD)
Create at least three partitions; one for Linux, one for Linux swap, and one for Windows (you can get fancy and put /home or /var, or anything else on its own partition, but at least two are required).
Linux goes on ext3, usually. Linux swap goes on swap, obviously. For the Windows one I usually format to Fat32, but it doesn't really matter.
Reboot with Windows CD
Format the Windows partition to NTFS, install
Reboot with Linux CD, install
 
Cew27 said:
depending on the hard drive you will need 1000mb of swap space and 40% of your harddrive space for linux (depending on where you want to save most files)
Click to expand...
The amount of swap necessary depends on your hardware and what you'll be doing. If you have gobs of RAM and will only be browsing the web you don't need much, if any. If you have only a wee bit of RAM and you'll be doing finite element analysis or other intense stuff like that then you'll need a lot. To be on the safe side 1-2 times the amount of RAM you have is a good bet.

Most Linux installs will need at least 2 GiB for the base system. Anything after that can be reserved for programs you install or files like music, documents, and videos that you plop in your home directory.

There's definitely no strict percentage rule.
 
thx for the advice billytheimpaler :) i am going to give it a whirl tomorrow , just downloading the iso image now for the gibbon
 
The advice given so far is pretty good.

For what it's worth, the way i do it is to use GParted (usually a seperate bootable CD - it just seems to work best). Setup 4 partitions, one for Windows, one for your Linux OS, one for /home, and one for swap.

/home is similar to Documents and Settings, and you can reinstall your Linux OS or upgrade the OS and stuff like your bookmarks, email settings, documents, desktop will still be intact in /home/username.

on a 160Gb drive i've given Windows 80Gb, the Linux OS (which is in / also known as root) gets around 8Gb which is plenty, swap gets 4Gb (twice my RAM), and the rest goes to /home.

/ and /home are formatted as ext3, and Windows is formatted as NTFS by the Windows installer. As already mentioned, install Windows first, then Linux so your bootloader is setup properly :)

I would suggest installing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy heron.
 
hi guy's
stumbled on a little problem while trying to install hardy heron , i am using a 24" screen 1920 x 1200 res . and the linux installer is set to a res that i can not make out on my screen , the image is very blured and i cannot make out the instructions . is there any way i can alter the res during install ?
 
Woah you really wont need 4gig swap, my last linux install i had going (gentoo on my uni laptop but i had real work/civ4 to do) didnt once need a swap space with 3 gig of ram. To put it in better context its only really needed if you using less than a gig with uber big applications (aka most the KDE suiet or soemthing).
 
slap ed said:
hi guy's
after not being that impressed with vista , i have decided too try a dual boot system with ubuntu and xp home 32 bit on my old rig . this will be a fresh install off both os's . and i would like a little guidance if possible please guys .
first which os would you install first and why ?
and second my main reason for trying linux is i believe it is possible to play il2 1946 online in hyperlobby on linux running wine ? anybody else in here managed to do this ? any info would be very much appreciated .
Click to expand...
#
pick up another hard drive -option b
 
Just installed Ubuntu today (some of our servers at work are Linux, so would like to get to know it a bit)

Did it on a Dell Vostro 1510, used PartionMagic to free up 30gb for Linux, then whacked the install disk in - created a 1gb swap file (just in case) then put Ubuntu in the rest of the space.

Apart from a quickly resolved niggle with my networking, it's up and running! So far, so good - looking to get down and dirty with it at the weekend - if anyone can suggest any good Linux websites/resources (esp CLI stuff) would be much appreciated!
 
what can i say up and running after one abbortive guided install :confused:
but everything is going great now recognized my hardware no problem .
now the learning curve :)
 
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