[Lancaster] Dual Booting

[Martyn Welch]

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On Wednesday 20 Jul 2005 11:10, Ken Hough wrote:

> Without additional software, XP (ie NTFS) partitions can be a bit of a
> problem. AFAIK, Linux can mount NTFS and can read from it, but is not
> guaranteed to be safe for writing.
>

That was true last time I read about it.

This also suggests that also to be true:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html#ntfsdriver

> I should add that I've had no personal experience of XP and have no
> intention of gaining any. 
>

I try to stay as far away from it as possible at all times.

> One of the advantages of dual booting Linux + MS Windows has been that
> Linux can mount and read/write MS partitions, specificaly FAT16 and
> FAT32. I've successfully set up quite a few dual booting systems with
> Win98. 

XP will also read FAT partitions. I have tended to suggest that those who wish 
to run both systems have a FAT partition for them to store stuff on that they 
require to be accessable by both OSes. This is a bit f a hack as FAT can't 
store Linux file permissions and thus the whole partition has to be made 
accessable as one user/group combination, not the best on multi-user systems.

Add to that the fact that FAT is vastly inferior to EXT3 or ReiserFS in terms 
of data security (EXT3 and ReiserFS are journalised file systems).

> It can work well, but there can be some serious problems if 
> (when) things go wrong with the Microsoft side of things. There are ways
> to manage/minimise problems, but IMHO, this is not made clear enough by
> any of the major Linux distributors.
>

There seems to be less and less to gain by dual booting these days anyway.

There is very little I can't do satisfactoraly on a Linux system (natively), 
there are also quite a few good tools for utilising software created for 
win32 under Linux, both free and proprietory. OK, I'm not a gamer, but there 
are native ports available for a good few very popular games.

Needless to say, without installing extensive quantities of third party 
applications, which aren't updated though a centralised patch management 
system, I find windows to be a very restrictive environment to work with. I 
hence try to avoid it at all costs.

Martyn

- -- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey/
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