Quote: Original post by Talroth
I've been using the live CD of ubuntu for a few days now, and I'm really liking it. I'm just worried about installing it for dual boot with my Windows XP.

Guess I have to go read up on it more.

What are the chances of being able to mess up your windows with installing a build?

As long as you're smart about it, very small chance of screwing anything up with Ubuntu.

1) Do you have unpartitioned HD space? If you don't: find a way to repartition your space, google for a free tool, there are a few out there that work well in XP.
2) Do a backup of your core windows data (you do this already, don't you [wink])
3) Reboot with the Ubuntu CD in your drive
4) Pay attention on the installation menu, when you get to the section about HD partitioning format your unpartitioned space, do not touch your NTFS file system that it shows. On the menu make the new linux partition bootable, and then proceed. It will show you which partitions it is going to change, if it says your NTFS one DO NOT PROCEED, go back and fix it (there is pretty easy to use help on this screen).
5) It will then ask to install grub to your MBR so that you can choose an OS when you boot, it should list any other OS you have installed (WinXP). As long as it does, you may proceed safely.
6) Continue installation as normal, remove the CD, reboot, you should see a GRUB menu where you can choose from:

(something like this)

 Ubuntu  Ubuntu (Recovery) MemTest Windows XP

If anything didn't go well, you have that backup :) but I've done a ton of dual-boots and never had a problem.

I'm on win98 however I used partroot/partboot disks to resize my windows partition so I could install ubuntu 4.10 on it. I also recorded original partiton size so I could revert back if I needed to. Then I booted off of ubuntu cd, created linux swap and root partitions and installed linux onto it. In one of my tries I forgot to create swap partition and had to do it after I installed ubuntu which was a bit more work since I didn't know the tools well. Basically, after couple of tries I got the hang of making partitions, installing os and dualbooting whatever os I wanted. I dual booted win98 with ubuntu and it worked fine. Later I hand edited a config file so that I could see win98 partition and that worked fine as well. The only problem came when I uninstalled linux, resized the partition with those tools back to its original size and proceeded to listen some music in win98. Halfway thru the song the computer either froze or bluescreened and when I rebooted it was going in a loop saying that my fat partition allocation table was corrupted. I tried various things but in the end had to reinstall win98 from scratch and that was a bit disappointing. So the bugs could be in MBR or in those tools wiping out partition info from my hard disk. Since then I didn't touched linux but I know that dualbooting is the best option I need. I seen a hw tool that allows switching between two harddrives and boot os from either one and I might consider that option just to be on the safe side.

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
The first thing, in my extensive experience on the subject, you should know is that nobody actually knows what they like or dislike about linux.

Lots of people will give you lots of stereotypical reasons for lots of things and claim to adhere to certain beliefs. It's all part of their insanity.

There are a lot of people who dislike linux because they know a whole lot of winapi, directx, and are heavy invested in learning microsoft technologies. They know the other guy, they don't know this guy. When they suddenly don't soak up the same mountains of information they've slowly accumulated about windows when trying out linux, they freak and invent hundreds of excuses for why linux sucks. You'll never hear the real reason from them. There are many other types of cases.

There are similiar things for why people like linux. For example, some people like linux just because there's a big community and they can feel involved just reading all of it. They'll never admit this either.

Nobody will ever tell you the real reason they like/dislike it. So take everybody's statements with a grain of salt.

I can offer two bits of advice for trying out linux, however. One, find a linux friend to help you install it. Don't get me started on how much of a bitch it is to install any operating system (personal experience with ancient debian woody and windows 2000 here). Two, use it. Lots of people install it, shrug, and never use it again. Well, duh. You didn't use it. It's not like there's a whole new usage category that opens up that lets you do completely new things with linux you'd be willing to stop whatever you were doing in windows and reboot for.

Use evolution, check email. Install eclipse and hack some java code. Run firefox and check out strongbad's latest email. Discover liferea and get the feeds from wired, slashdot, lwn, etc streaming into your computer. Maybe try to start hacking on some gtk app or something. try some games: gnotan,wesnoth,uqm, or spring $5 on getting World of Warcraft to work on linux from cedega or whatever.

If you use it, you'll find all the big things are there, and all those little things that used to be just different, actually turn out to be nice. sometimes very nice. gstreamer is freaking amazing. not particularily at format compatibility, perhaps, but the sheer capability is astounding. Some dude is using it to do video broadcasts.

That's all I have to say about having a good experience with linux.

I would give you rating++ if I could.

I consider myself pretty well-versed linux. I've used redhat, mandrake, gentoo, and debian. My personnal favorite is debian. Gentoo would have been my favorite, except that I had to spend about an hour compiling every time I had updates. In my experience linux was a fun way to waste time.

smr, here's a link just for you:
Arch Linux

If you haven't tried it out yet, do so, you just might like it ;)

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
The first thing, in my extensive experience on the subject, you should know is that nobody actually knows what they like or dislike about linux.

Affordability
Stability - Windows can't hold a match to *nix when comparing uptime/downtime.
Speed - I've yet to see a windows server (NT/2000) come close to Linux/Unix in speed/power.
Adaptability

That's just a few off the top o my head.

Quote: Original post by Prefect

I would give you rating++ if I could.

hear hear

Quote: Original post by Scribbler
Stability - Windows can't hold a match to *nix when comparing uptime/downtime.
Speed - I've yet to see a windows server (NT/2000) come close to Linux/Unix in speed/power.

These two are both bullshit.

Well give him some credit on one of his arguments:
Not sure why they call linux BSD/OS on here

Quote: Original post by eedok
Well give him some credit on one of his arguments:
Not sure why they call linux BSD/OS on here

BSD/OS != linux

BSD/OS(bsdi) is in reference to the commericial BSD. Which I believe is owned by windriver, atm. It was a split off BSD4.3, at least going by unix history. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I also thought in the old linux kernels, like up to 2.4.2(long fixed by now) where the linux kernel couldn't count being up higher than 471 days or so, so the numbers would be somewhat wrong as it wouldn't see those machines, prior to that fix. (never used linux, so could be wrong again).