dual booting xp and ubuntu

dark_angel

dark_angel

Member
hi
i have xp on my computer know. I have 53 gb of space left and looking at doing a dual boot of xp and ubuntu. Any suggestions on how to go about doing this. Also is dual booting any good? Are there any problems? Anything you can give me on this would be great.
Thanks in advance
 
The first item you will want for trying this out would be GParted live fo cd. You don't want to shrink the current primary too far depending on how much you plan to use for the root and swap partitions that will be needed. Once you shrink the primary down several gigs create the root and swap(2gb for the virtual memory) you then have to dsecide if you want Grub installed into the mbr or simply use a ubuntu boot manager to load either by choosing the load OS on partition.... option from floppy.

The other option is a universal boot loader that sees buttons you simply click on for the OS you want to load. On the last build I found a freeware for this but unfortunately lost the link for it. You simply installed that instead into the XP mbr and you were set to go. All you did was click the Windows or Linux button the installer used for each. It worked with Fedora here at the time.

The thing you will want to pay close attention to for a manual configuration as the often better option is a good look over of the sections seen at http://www.hezardastan.org/breezy_xp_dualboot/en/

The best article found for using the freeware known as U-Boot gives detailed instruction as well as some good links at http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5085702347.html Eventually I may use this for booting Mandriva or another distro along with XP and Vista already installed here. That may even be able to boot Solaris 10 as well.
 
when you install ubuntu it will automatically partition and resize your drive. Choose ext3 file system since it is the current and most stable. This particular file system does not need a vritual memory parition but you can create one anyways if you wish.

If you just use the suggested configuration the installer of ubuntu will automatically resize your drive and recommend what to do. that would be the easiest way to get it installed so you can learn.

It will also install GRUB by default which is a boot loader. If it doesn't pick up your windows installation, do not fear. You can edit the /boot/grub menu and add the installation in manually and it will then work.
 
Actually ubuntu is one of the easier distros to get running over some like Red Hat's Fedora. PC Linux is also more user friendly for the MS to Linux crossover there. What tarkin is talking about there is the improvements seen with the newer distros being more self contained having drive tools included over the cfdisk and Grub/Lilo download separate times. Since it is "open source" and not retail like MS and Apple you can see something new implemented much faster once something is submitted.
 
jamie_2k6 said:
wats ubuntu like is it good ?
Click to expand...

ubuntu is really good. i really like it, if you had a computer and needed a cheep OS. ubuntu is free and it pretty much looks like windows, and with use of open office i really think ubuntu is the best option for people that just do word possessing and internet stuff
 
I have never heard anything negative about ubuntu. The boot manager they offered for floppy also came in handy for multiple OSs where you simply choose the partition to load the OS without any changes seen in mbrs. That was better there then installing some universal boot loaders. For getting familisr with how to boot Linux installing a small distro like Zenwalk, Darnsmall, and others ruled out the need for a swap partition too. The older versions of the large distros often had the need. But you can also use one swap partition for more then one distro.
 
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