[GTALUG] Dual boot

[Mauro Souza]

I have multi boot since 20 or more years ago without issues. I once had a
system with Windows XP, Windows 2000, two flavors of Linux and OpenBSD at
the same time. I believe Grub on one Linux was the one managing everything,
it was a long time ago...

It was not a PoC, it was my daily driver. Ubuntu was my main system, Gentoo
was the Linux I was learning, I had windows 2000 since I built the system
and refused to kill it and has some games there that lost the installation
disk, Windows XP for the new games, and OpenBSD because why not?

I had one vfat partition for sharing files between everybody, it worked.

On Fri, Jul 28, 2023, 04:05 D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> | From: Gron Arthur via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> |
> | Thinking of buying a Dell 3571 and making it dual boot with Windows and
> | Debian. Main reason for Windows is, I want Nikon's ViewNX software for my
> | DSLR camera and can't for the life of me figure out how to run it off an
> | emulator.
> |
> | Does anyone see an issue with a setting up a dual boot?
>
> The Precision 3571 comes with an NVidia GPU.  I find them annoying because
> of lack of open source drivers.  The closed source drivers work amazingly
> well considering that they are out-of-tree.  I don't need a discrete GPU
> but perhaps you do.
>
> My computers usually come with Windows.  For those computers, I almost
> always install Linux without deleting Windows.
>
> I find it easy to set up dual boot, but that may well be due to lots
> of practice.  There are often little problems that I know how to deal
> with.  Here are a few:
>
> - Windows, by default, potentially leaves the filesystems in an
>   inconsistent state when it is shut down!
>
>   To fix this, on Windows:
>
>         Control Panel:
>         Hardware and Sound:
>         Power Options
>         Choose what the power button does:
>
>         click "change settings that are currently unavailable"
>
>         Under "Shutdown Settings"
>         UN-check "Turn on fast startup"
>
>         click "save changes"
>
>
> - how to make room for Linux on the disk.  Windows can resize filesystems
>   but it won't release more than 50%.  You probably want more released.
>
>   1. boot a live Linux system and use gparted to shrink Windows partitions
>      to make enough space.  I generally leave Windows about 100G
>
>   2. boot Windows and ask it to fix the filesystem that you shrunk.
>      (gparted leaves something not quite right but Windows knows how to
>      fix it)
>
>   3. boot the Linux install medium and proceed to install.
>
>
> Why do I use dual boot?
>
> - warranty support almost always requires Windows
>
> - I paid for it, why throw it away?  See "Sunk Cost Fallacy"
>
> - most systems require Windows for firmware updates.
>   It used to be that you could do firmware updates from a bootable
>   DOS floppy or USB stick but that's almost dead.
>   Some vendors support Linux through fwupd.
>
> - once in a blue moon I have something that I want to use Windows for.
>   That means I only need to have Windows on one computer, not many.
>
> Summary: mostly habit.
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