Edited to say
This thread really is about dual booting Linux and Windows so if you have no interest in either of those topics then I'll save a few minutes of your life and stop you from reading further. :-)


I want to set up my computer so that it dual boots some flavour of Linux and XP. I've never used any form of Linux before (bar using xwindows on Unix machines *cough cough* 20 years ago), all my PC experience has been with Windows.

My desire to install Linux is more to do with the desire to learn something new than any actual need. If I like it however I'd like to wean myself off Windows.

My basic questions are.

1. How best to partition the HD?
2. How best to set up the dual boot?
3. What flavour of Linux to use?

1. How best to partition the HD?
Eventually I'll be installing a NAS on my router to hold all my files but for now I'll just be using the local machine for storage. Can all my data be held on the same partition and accessed by both the Linux and Windows install? FAT32 or NTFS for this? I did read that Linux wasn't particularly good at reading NTFS partitions but this was from quite an old website so maybe this isn't so relevant anymore? Is it best to have 3 partitions (1 Windows OS, 1 Linux OS and 1 shared data) or just keep them as two separate entities? I don't mind keeping the two OS's as completely seperate entities but would prefer it if they could use the same central data partition. How much space should I reserve for a Linux OS partition.

2. How best to set up the dual boot?
GRUB vs LILO vs somethingelse answer on a postcard please.

3. What flavour of Linux to use?
It will be running on an Athlon 3400 with 2 Gb RAM. I'll be using it mostly for t'internet, email, photo editing, music editing and a bit of 3D CAD (Pro/Engineer). It would be nice to get all the applications listed above running on it but not essential as I have them in Windows anyway.

I'll be having a better read of this, this, this and this later. Are there any better guides that I should read or are any of those particularly useless for my needs?

I'm currently using XP 32Bit, Vista 32bit and openSUSE 11.1 64Bit. Grub works perfectly for me, very easy to setup and manage. I'm now attempting to install MythTv, being that my knowledge on Linux is tiny this has been interesting!

I used the default options for SUSE install on a new 250Gb disk I think the install size is about the same as Vista so quite bulky, nothing special needed with the setup all down to pesonal preference really, Vista and XP run off another HDD.

Installed XP first then Vista to dual boot, this is the simplest way to dual boot XP and Vista as the bootloader is different, good old MS.

Best thing to do is play, you can't bust anything. Set it up as you said and it will work fine, why do you need to dual boot first anyway? Setup a Virtual machine and get familiar test\play with it

I have to re-install the everything on the machine anyway so I thought I might as well set it it up now.

Can't really comment - I don't use vista or 64-bit linux - but I'd go for kubuntu, and I partition my dual boot XP/kubuntu system thus (from memory - numbers should add up to about 160G and they don't!):

partition 1: 3 gig Acer system restore
partition 2: 10 gig XP C: drive, FAT32
partition 3: 40 gig XP D: drive, FAT32
partition 4: remainder of disk, sub-partitioned
4a: 1g swap partition
4b: 128M /boot ext 3
4c: 20G / ext3
4d: 80G /home rieserfs

All the windows partitions are visible to linux, none of the linux is available to windows. Install windows first, and because you can't make a FAT32 partition that big in windows (and it won't tell you why!) you make the d: partition in the linux partition tool on installation. You'll need the expert mode, rather than relying on defaults.

Setting everything to FAT32 seems to be most reliable; I'm not yet happy that linux can handle writes properly on NTFS and to be honest I'm not convinced windows can either. I may be out of date on that. Ext 3 because it's vaguely journalled for the boot and root sectors; rieserfs because it's a good journalled system for data that matters.

A separate /home section so anything I write won't be be lost if I re-install; 20g on / to give room to install stuff without the need for a separate /usr or /var partition. Kubuntu because the interface is more familiar to a windows user.

That's good because I'm using XP and am not bothered about any 64bit variants.

I'll have a look at Kubuntu.

As written, all the windows partitions are writeable and readable from linux. Also, if you're playing, you really only need the swap partition (the same size or a little bigger than your memory, usually, or a gig, whichever is bigger) and the / partition; /home and /boot will happily live in there - it's just convenient to play without killing your home partition.

A month later and I'm about ready to get cracking. XP is now freshly installed and I spent last night downloading several hundred Mb of security updates. FWIW this is not because its taken me a month to install XP, just that I only got round to starting the install this week.

I'm going the Kubuntu route wholly for the reason you mentioned above. Is there anywhere useful I want to be reading for help other than Kubuntu.org?


On my travels around the internet I found FS-Drive which lets XP read/write to /ext3 partitions. Has anyone used this and is it any good? My definition of good would be reliable for my data. The idea that I could avoid using FAT32 for my data is quite attractive to me.

Personally, I would not let windows software read any other OS's partition. However, read/write NTFS access is apparently available - though I don't know if I trust that any more! I think you may find that the ntfs-3g driver package is not automatically loaded. Reading is there already; I suspect that to enable the writing you might need to edit /etc/fstab.

The idea to use /ext3 for my shared data partition which would be my (XP data)/(Kubuntu /home) partition came from this guide. The model I'm looking at using is third from bottom.

My understanding from the FS-Drive FAQ is that for my shared data (/home) partition, I'd get the full benefits of /ext3 whilst accessing it from Kunbuntu and it would behave as an /ext2 drive whilst being accessed from Windows.

In my mind (I may be very wrong as this is all new to me) this is at least better than having a shared FAT32 partition. I appreciate that my data wouldn't be as secure as having the /home drive as /rieserfs but that isn't an option for me as my day to day data needs to be available to XP.

I have no desire to get at / from XP or at NTFS from Kubuntu. It's just my data I want to be able to get from both.

Windows is now doing everything I want (at least before I try to put in my second sound card and graphics card ) so in the meantime I have a Kubuntu install disc burning a hole in my pocket. Just logging off for a while, I may be gone some time.

It's a matter of taste by now, I suspect. My instinct is to have linux able to look at a windows partition rather than vice versa; linux was always designed to make it easy to hook alternate file systems into the kernel, whereas windows only ever expected to run its own systems.

It seems that NTFS is now considered OK, so FAT32 is no longer necessary. That said, I've never had an issue with FAT32 shared partitions.

Since when has Windows been able to read ext2 or ext3?

Well that didn't go very well. My first attempt left me with no cursor and a screen that looked like this! The happily running laptop in the middle is running good old reliable Vista.

Fortunately, after a while of no activity the cat came along, gave me a slap and pointed out that I must have pressed the return key twice when the menus first came up and inadvertently gone into the "run kubuntu as is" option. She sorted it for me but obviously wasn't too happy about having her time wasted.

Oh well, try again tonight.

and

I is typing this from my Kubuntu install.

My second monitor still looks like it's downloading a Spectrum game but I'm getting there.

Well done that man. Can't help you with the second monitor; never tried that.

Waffly bit
I got a driver update for my graphics card which gave me a decent resolution for my main monitor (was stuck at 800x600 before that). When I installed the drivers I got a warning message from Kubuntu regarding the drivers being proprietary, not open source and that Kubuntu wouldn't be able to fix tham if there was a problem. I'm used to the daft "nanny state" warnings that you get from Windows along the lines of "Do you really really really want to look in *that* folder at *your* files on *your* computer?" so ignored it.

I did then get the second monitor displaying after a bit of fiddling but only at a low resolution. For some reason Kubuntu only detected my second monitor as being the same type as my first, which it isn't. More fiddling resulted in no graphical interface and a bit more resulted in no Kubuntu at all so I re-installed the bugger. I concluded that the following command is useful.
cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.bak.saved

I then had problems with my Windows install of a magnitude I have never seen before and ended up torching that install as well. I couldn't boot from any CD so had to resort to using XP install floppies and starting the lot from scratch.

For the record I decided upon the following set up for my 300G SATA drive.

60G Windows system drive NTFS
180G Shared data drive TBD but probably NTFS
10G Windows restore data TBD but probably NTFS
4G /home /ext3
128M /boot /ext3
30G / /ext3
4G Kubuntu swap (2G system RAM)

I'm now back as I was last week with a working system albeit with only one monitor at a low resolution in Kubuntu. FWIW I have an nForce2 chipset with an embedded GeForce4 on board.

New questions
1. Is it a problem to use proprietary non open source drivers (eg graphics)? Should I take note of any such warning notices from Kubuntu (see start of waffly bit above)?

2. I use my phone as a USB flash drive which Kubuntu can happily read but I couldn't work out the Kubuntu equivalent of "Safely remove hardware" resulting in a "possible data corruption message" on my phone when I removed it. Is there a way to do the "safely remove hardware" in Kubuntu?

3. What is anyone's recommended photo editing software in Linux? I had a play around with the gimp and didn't find it too bad but the lack of precise control over cropping and resizing still had me running back to Photoshop.

4. Same question for browser, I found the Konqueror a bit clunky so was going to pop firefox in. Anybody got any preferences?

1) the non-proprietary warning is because the license doesn't allow them to include the code directly; generally there will be no harm. I'm using non-prop broadcom wifi drivers and non-prop flash for firefox.

2) It will usually put an icon on the desktop; if it's mounted, it will have little green triangle bottom right of the icon; if not, it won't. Right click on the icon and select 'safely remove'; little green triangle will go away and you can remove. Generally not a problem anyway unless you have outstanding writes to the device. There's a more complicated way involving the terminal and the umount command.

3) Personal preference. I don't do a lot but I keep the gimp around for resizing and cropping. I'd rather have a linux paintshoppro V5 but the company have told me forget it.

4) Firefox for me, with adblocker+ and noscript plugins.

Might as well resurrect this thread for some questions and make it a single thread record of my foray into LinuxVille.

I finally got both screens working properly but that was more accident than design. I took the oppportunity to upgrade to 9.something (angry antelope or whatever) and when I'd done that the dual screen set up worked perfectly without resorting to proprietary drivers.

Questions
1. Idiots corner
How do I install Firefox properly? I downloaded it, un-tar'ed it but I can't get it to appear as my default browser and the only way I can get it to run is to go to Wishy\home where I un-tar'ed it and run the binary directly. That surely can't be right. The love affair between me and Konqueror is over (not that it was much to start with).

2. Windows corner
My windows install has blown up, probably due to a house power failure whilst Windows was running. Is there any way that I can run something like chkdsk /r in Linux on the Windows partition?
I'd like to avoid resorting to running that from a Windows set up disc because it's a small form factor machine and I can't do it without taking the case off and attaching a floppy and CD drive directly to the inside of the machine.

1) sudo apt-get install firefox
I think it asks you if you want the non-free plugins, but I think they're called 'firefox-plugins'. Or go through the Adept Installer.

2) I think there is, but I'm not familiar with all flavours. For fat32, http://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck.vfat - but for NTFS you may be out of luck.

Funnily enough I found an idiots guide to installing firefox just about 5 seconds ago.

It is an NTFS volume I'm trying to repair.

On the plus side I'm typing this on the Linux bit of my computer that still does work.

Next question, I can set the machine up dual screen (OK so it's called TwinView) fine but it won't save the settings to my X server xorg.conf file. Any ideas? I will of course be trying that Google thingy for a solution.

I haven't had to look at an xorg.conf for years - till last week when I was trying to speed up the frame rate on something (interpolated isabel or whatever it's called is damn slow on my chipset). It looks like most of the parameters aren't saved in the .conf any more, but I don't know where they actually are.

I'm resurrecting this again as I might as well use this thread as a rolling history of my foray into PenguinLand.

I solved the dual screen issue, this link helped sort out. Some more reading showed that there is a bug in the nVidia configuration utility in that it doesn't have the correct permissions to save to the xorg.conf file. The upshot of this is that you can change what you like but it would never be saved upon reboot.

I even worked out how to switch my boot order around so that Windows was my default option. I still use it most and having to wait and select the desired menu option every boot was becoming a pain.

Next questions
1. Does anyone know a really good online "Linux for dummies" type tutorial? Basics on the principles of what the various sudo command thingies actually do and a handy list of commands would help me a lot.

2. I made a mint7 KDE pendrive install which worked except that it just boots me to a command prompt. How the flipping heck do I invoke the GUI from there?

3. Anyone know how to partition a USB pendrive in Kubuntu? I'd like to make my pendrive dual boot but I'm struggling here. I've found plenty of instructions as how to do this in Windows (such as utilities to swap the removeable media bit) but none of them work. Forgive me if this is easy as I haven't started to look properly at this in Linux yet. I just thought I'd ask whilst I was on the subject.

2) try 'startx' or 'kdm' and see what happens. I'm guessing here...

3) https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/installation-guide/i386/partition-programs.html

See how I skipped past (1)?

I am using virtualbox from sun (freeware) to boot ubuntu server and desktop versions on my mac (they run under a virtual machine) I think it's a good idea to use a virtual machine until you are confident with the software.

And I can have several version of Linux running at once of try out different versions of Linux)

works under Linux and windows xp as well and does away with the need to dual boot and mess up your existing hard drive

Latest update.

I've got my Kubuntu set up working pretty much as I'd like it so I thought I'd mess things up a bit by changing graphics cards!

I've changed from an on board nVidia card to an AGP ATI one (for reasons that are way too long for me to get into here) and I now have nothing but a command prompt. Windoze is fine with the change.

I've since learnt that I should have changed the device entry from nVidia to vesa before swapping cards.

Is there any way to do this from the command prompt? I would very much like to avoid having to unplug the ATI card, wire up on board nVidia card, set the bios back to looking at the on board card again, start Kubuntu, do the xorg.conf edit, shut down, unwire nVidia card, plug ATI card back in, set Bios back where it was and start again. In particular the location of the box and wiring is a pain so if I could do this from a command prompt I would be quite happy.

P.S. Anyone used GNUMoney as I'm looking at trying this?

To reconfigure your graphics card from the command prompt type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Thanking you, I'll try that tonight.

Suprisingly pain free when you when ask someone who knows what they're doing!

I is typing this from Kubuntu again, now to get the dual screens working on my new card.