Installing Ubuntu

[Mark]

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Stephen <stephen_o at rogers.com> wrote:
> On 05/11/2010 1:41 AM, Basil Chupin wrote:
>> On 05/11/2010 17:30, Stephen wrote:
>>> I didn't express myself clearly. I want the boot loader to be on the
>>> floppy disk, so with out the floppy it will go straight to windows.
>>>
>>> Thanks again.
>>> Stephen Oulton
>>>
:

>>
>> BC
>>
> I've had to re-install windows three times. Every time it over writes
> the MBR and I have to reinstall Ubuntu as well. If the boot loader is on
> a floppy instead of the MBR that problem goes away. Every one else that
> uses the computer uses windows.
>
I'd say this was the part you didn't express clearly in your original post.

Hopefully you now have more than one alternative, though I still say
that using a floppy for this seems arcane.

Seems like it would make more sense to run Windows in a VM on your
Ubuntu host and have your Windows users use the VMs instead of
rebooting the main system.  Having to reinstall Windows is a lot of
work (I've done it enough times myself), it is too often necessary for
reasons that we won't explore here, and one of the best reasons NOT to
use it as a base/boot system at all.

I've never actually done this, but I can't imagine that It's really
that hard to set up a user that runs a VM as the default login.  Set
their final .profile (or .bash_profile) line to execute the VM,
followed by an optional snapshot save and then automatic exit
(logoff).  They'll be able to run Windows and you have WAY less
trouble keeping the machine alive and running....

Mark