eyesight check

[Gryllida]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Kevin Hunter <hunteke at earlham.edu> wrote:

> At 3:06am -0500 Sat, 20 Feb 2010, Gryllida wrote:
> > I have only one partition. Windows XP currently boots from it. I
> > don't know where I can install Ubuntu... Maybe I could shrink the
> > existing partition, but that's quite dangerous - will XP boot
> > from it again then?
>
> Let me suggest virtualization as the possible better route.  Reasoning:
>
> 1. You've suggested that you're much more comfortable with Windows.  If
> you're interested to learn Linux, virtualization is one very harmless
> way to check it out.
>
> 2. You won't need to do any partition management.  The only thing you'll
> have to do is create a large file, say 10G for starters.  This large
> file would be the "hard drive" of the virtual computer, and you would
> create it with the GUI tools available through the virtualization
> solution.  This is safer, because contrary to David's experience, I have
> definitely encountered instances (2 in the last month) where there were
> issues with the existing partition such that the Ubuntu installer didn't
> play nice
>
> 3. If you decide you don't like it, it's as simple as clicking a delete
> button in a GUI, and you get all your disk space back.  Juxtapose that
> experience with having to repartition everything again.
>
> 4. You can run both systems simultaneously.  It sounds like you live
> most of your life in Windows, and trying to convert too quickly might
> cause you headache.  Besides, if you're doing web development, you need
> to see the rendering capabilities of multiple browsers.  Having to
> reboot to windows every so often just to check the rendering of a web
> page would get tedious fast.
>
> 5. Virtualization tools are free and Free.  VirtualBox is my current
> favorite general-purpose virtualization solution because it's super
> fast, "just works", is easy to install on almost every platform
> (including Windows), and is GPL to boot.  (Side note: VirtualBox is the
> *much* bigger loss than MySQL in this Oracle buyout of Sun.  Much bigger.)
>
> 6. If you understand the concept that a virtual computer means
> "virtualizating /everything/ for the 'guest' computer", then learning
> the VirtualBox GUI should take you no more than 30 minutes.  It's very
> easy, and has wizards for a large portion of what it does.  Further,
> it's help documentation is surprisingly well-written.
>
> Reasons not to go the virtualization route:
>
> - You don't have enough RAM.  Remember that you're virtualizing a
> computer, and it will need RAM, just like a physical machine.  So you'd
> need devote at least 512M of RAM to a guest Ubuntu while it was running.
>  If you don't have the ram to spare, virtualization might not be a
> solution.
>
> - You don't have the virtualization hardware support available on your
> processor or enabled in your BIOS.  I don't actually know how to check
> for this with Windows, but on Linux, you would do:
>
> $ grep -Ei "vmx|svm" /proc/cpuinfo
>
> If that returns any data in your flags line, you have the capability.
> You might have to enable it in the BIOS, but at least you know you have it.
>
> Kevin
>
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no, I want Ubuntu be independent of Windows. Thanks again for this
suggestion.
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