testing partitions ?

[Sasha Tsykin]

Bill Marcum wrote:

>On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:54:24 -0500, ANU DEV 
>  <anubuntu at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Acttually my laptop runs Windows only but another PC has Ubuntu breezy 
>>only. If I download program packages from the internet to test and run 
>>does it need a special partition to test a program ? Is testing done 
>>as root or superuser ? I have data in the ubuntu PC which I dont want 
>>to lose if it crashes while testing. Can someone help explain this
>>please.
>>    
>>
>
>What kind of programming do you intend to do?  Writing device drivers or 
>modifying the kernel?  For most user-space programming, there is no need
>to make a special partition, and if your program crashes it won't crash 
>the entire system.
>
>
>  
>
If you are going to be programming and testing programs which have an 
impact on your entire system, eg. kernel drivers, then install qemu and 
kqemu (a virtual machine program) and install ubuntu again on that. You 
can use that to test because it is separate from the rest of your system 
and thus quite  harmless. Otherwise, test where ever you feel like it.