Comments on: Clean Installation of Vista, XP and Ubuntu

By: wm

wm — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:41:07 +0000

I would like to recommend VirtualBox. I currently have a PC running, Vista, XP, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu and believe it or not a copy of OS/2! Yes! OS/2…
Everything appears to be running just great! I used to partition my disks and stuff and it was a real pain in the neck. You have to do all sorts of partitions. So, the best way to go is virtualization. Good luck!

By: djeepp

djeepp — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:49:12 +0000

I use VirtualBox every day to host my Windows OS and a few others. It is very efficient and not overly complicated. If you do decide to virtualize, I would agree with Sds9985 that VirtualBox is the way to go.

By: mshen

mshen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:43:56 +0000

Djeepp, I didn’t say you needed to use virtualization for different file systems, it would just make things easier which is why I put the suggestion in the discussion instead of the answer field.

By: sds9985

sds9985 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:04:37 +0000

I already see some good suggestions here.

You can install many operating systems on the hard drive(s) and use grub to boot any of them. This makes for lots of partitions, lots of tricks with the boot loader and MBR and implies that only one OS will be running at a time.

If I wanted all of those OS’s available and if I had enough RAM to support it, I’d install Sun’s VirtualBox. You could use any of the operating systems as the base OS (although I think I’d use OpenSolaris for that), then create whatever guests you want. You’ll need at least 512MB for each running guest, so if you have 1GB, you can have at least OpenSolaris and one other OS up at the same time. Any or all of the guests can be running at the same time, but if you run too many for the RAM you have, performance will degrade when the host OS starts to swap. You can switch back and forth between them instantly and you can share folders between any of them. VirtualBox is free. See http://www.virtualbox.org.

I prefer Fedora for my workstation, but I have the need to test scripts under RHEL 5.3 and 4.7 and SLES 9.4, since that’s what the Linux servers here run. So, I have the base OS as Fedora and the others available as guests under VirtualBox. Just for giggles, a colleague here (whose base OS is also Fedora) installed Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.2 as guests the other day. Both ran fine. The “filesystem” for each guest is just a file on the host OS drives, so no actual new partitions are needed.

If you don’t have the RAM to support the above approach, then you’ll have to install all of them and use grub to select one at a time. I’d install the Windows versions first, then Ubuntu, then OpenSolaris. Windows will overwrite grub, so you want to get those in first, before you install Linux.

By: carlosdl

carlosdl — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:04:56 +0000

You are right Djeepp, he may not need virtualization, but if he can achieve what he needs with virtualization, it might be a better option than creating a multi-boot configuration, since he cuold switch from one operating system to another without the need to reboot the machine, and he could even have more than one of his virtual machines running simultaneously. Also, he could create as many virtual machines as he wants, without the need to re-partition the disk, and if he decides to buy a new machine, it would be easier to move the virtual machines to the new host. But, it all depends on details we don't have. Cheers,

By: djeepp

djeepp — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:31:42 +0000

I’m not sure why he would need virtualization just because of different file systems. File systems don’t span partitions and you can put as many different partitions on a disk as you want.

By: carlosdl

carlosdl — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:05:06 +0000

I agree with Mshen. In this scenario, virtualization could be the best option, unless you need to have complete access to the hardware or features that are not available in a virtual machine.

By: mshen

mshen — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:07:23 +0000

This involves several different files systems. I think your best bet is virtualization.