Ubuntu

Ubuntu and dual boot systems - any consensus?

Asked by Dave Haring

Hello. I'm successfully (whatever that means) running Ubuntu 8.10. (Pardon me however while I come off 22 years of Bill.) I would like to be able to keep Ubuntu 8.10 as my main OS, but, be able to install and operate other OS's for testing purposes without making Ubuntu 8.10 mad. In other words I want to be able to install some other OS, use it, beat it up a bit, and then can it and install something else in its place - all the while maintaining a happy relationship with U810.

I've been reading for some 8 hours now about grubs, bugs, VMware, some kind of nest - and a hundred other things for this purpose. Is there any consensus as to what's best given what I'm trying to accomplish? Thank you for your time.

PS - I'm running an ASUS G2S Extreme with 2GB/180GB, and, Ubuntu 8.10 is currently installed on the whole drive. If the *best* answer involves a reinstall of Ubuntu 8.10 I'm ok with that, since, and it might just be a hold over nervous tick, but I do believe in clean installs and *not* using any magic pixie dust to create my partitions (unless of course it actually works:) Thank you again...

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Andre Mangan
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Best Andre Mangan (kyphi) said : 		#1

Currently I run 3 operating systems in VirtualBox all from Ubuntu 8.04. That is today, I mean. Whenever new distros are released I like to have a look. It is a bit like reading a newspaper - it keeps you informed. The temptation to switch is foreign; Ubuntu is the best there is.

Of these virtualised systems one is XP (for one programme that was written to work in Windows) and another is a command line teacher (INX). The third is a transient dalliance by the name of Fedora 9. These transients come and go without any harm to the host Ubuntu.

To sum up, you will have to install VirtualBox (it is in the repositories) and learn how to use it. No changes are necessary to Ubuntu other than the addition of this one programme.

There are two sources for VirtualBox: one is the OSE version (Open Source Edition) from Add/Remove, the other is the Sun Microsystems Edition (from Sun website). The Sun version has USB support out of the box (not really essential) and also gives you the latest version (v2.0.6) but updates are your responsibility. The version in the Ubuntu repositories will be automatically updated when considered safe - no discernible version number is given - the number refers to the kernel.

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Dave Haring (4trade) said : 		#2

Nice! That's perfect. Thank you!

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Dave Haring (4trade) said : 		#3

Thanks Andre Mangan, that solved my question.