[ale] Fwd: new linux user

[Charles Shapiro]

Pretty accurate. Virtualization ain't exactly like cygwin. cygwin is a bunch
of linux programs ported to the windows environment (including bash(1), so
it sort of looks like a virtualized linux/unix environment).

True virtualization means running one operating system as a program under
another. So you can have one or more virtual  windows machines running as
programs in a linux environment, or one or more virtual linux boxes running
under windows, or of course windows/windows and linux/linux environments.
There're several programs around which will allow this -- the most famous is
probably vmware, a commercial product which can do any of the scenarios I've
outlined above. I've used it, and although running multiple vms tends to eat
a lot of memory and speed it's pretty ok good. Other solutions include
VServer (less resource-intensive, easy to get virtual machines to interact
with each other) and Xen (requires modifications to the OS which is gonna
run as a program).

I'd advise you to configure your machine dual-boot, unless you have some
specific burning need to either keep a windows instance running all the time
or hot-switch between linux and windows without rebooting. Most of the time
you'll encounter vmware and its cousins on a server.

And hey, welcome to the list!

-- CHS


On 10/17/07, David Mebane <david.mebane at mse.gatech.edu> wrote:
>
>
> I'm fairly novice myself, but since this is one I can actually say
> something
> about, thought I'd jump in there.
>
> I don't know anything about virtualization (is this like CygWin?), but I
> dual-boot my machines here at work with SuSE.  (I run ubuntu at home on a
> single-boot machine, and I must say that I prefer it to SuSE.)
>
> Dual booting is not too hard with SuSE, especially if you have a separate
> HD to
> devote to each OS.  You start with a machine with Windows
> installed.  Then,
> either with an empty second hard drive or an empty partition (unformatted
> or
> FAT32 formatted) on the drive with Windows, you pop in the install
> disk.  At
> least with SuSE, the installer formats the empty drive/partition, installs
> the
> linux OS there and then installs a boot loader, which controls the
> selection of
> the OS at boot time.  The SuSE installer also mounts a (read-only) drive
> in
> linux to the Windows drive/partition.  One thing to make certain of is
> that you
> know the physical names/location of the disk/partition where Windows is
> installed, otherwise, you might accidentally overwrite it during
> installation.
>
> I'm not sure if ubuntu does everything just like that, but given its
> popularity
> with retail users I would be surprised if it didn't.  You may run into
> problems
> installing -- nothing is guaranteed, but the ubuntu community actually
> does a
> very good job of keeping up with hardware.  My single-boot ubuntu install
> on a
> latest-model laptop went quite smoothly.
>
> By the way, as someone at GT-LUG once told me, there is no guarantee that
> linux
> will be more stable than Windows.  I have learned this to be true.  What
> is also
> true, however, is that in Linux there are no secrets.  If you want to know
> badly
> enough, you can always find out what's going on with a problem and
> possibly fix
> it.
>
>
> -David
>
>
> Quoting sdinh at gatech.edu:
>
> > hi. i'm sick of vista and its instability so i figured now would be the
> > perfect time to switch to ubuntu with gusty coming out and all. even
> > though it hurts me to say it, i still need windows. so, i was thinking
> > about using xp in conjunction with ubuntu because xp is way more stable.
>
> > i just don't know how to incorporate the two OSes together. i've read
> > about dual booting and i've also saw some stuff called virtualization.
> > which would work better and how would i go about doing that? any help
> > will be appreciated.
> >
> > -scott
> >
>
>
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