Wanted: Pro to build dual boot Ubuntu

[NoOp]

On 09/14/2014 09:27 AM, Charles Irons wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I have followed Joep Blom's saga with wine and am impressed by the
> willing help Colin, Nils and others have offered.
> 
> I hope this forum will find a professional who provides a commercial
> service in Randburg.  
> 
> I am a retired end-user of Ubuntu 12.04 on a 9 year old desktop that I
> need to replace. It dual boots Win XP.
> 
> The SARS online efiling won't work with Ubuntu since Adobe  dropped
> Flashplayer for Linux. So I  assume I need Win 8 as well.
> 
> Trouble is I doubt my skills are good enough to install dual boot Ubuntu
> 14.04 LTS and Win 7 or 8 on a new desktop .
> 
> Any advice or offer to work for me is welcome.
> 
> PS I started on Ubuntu with 5.04 LTS
> 
> Keep the Open Source mission alive. Chas I

Charles,

You most likely won't need a local to assist. I remotely support my
brother & we've managed to remotely transfer all of his data from a 2000
Win XP machine to a new Windows 8.1 laptop, sync the two, backup the
images to an external Toshiba 500GB USB 3.0 portable hard drive, install
both Virtualbox and VMWare Player & image his 40GB WinXP onto Windows
8.1... and, install 14.04 on the new laptop as dualboot and with GRML
(https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot#grml-rescueboot). All
remotely. However given that you've been running Ubuntu since Mt.
Everest was dust & already dual-boot Ubuntu & WinXP, I reckon that
you'll do just fine.

First thing's I'd recommend buying are:

1. USB IDE/SATA adaptor:
https://www.google.com/#q=usb+ide+hard+drive+adapter
This will allow your to remove your hard drives from the old machine and
directly connect them to the new desktop/laptop as external drives.

2. Go and buy an external portable 500GB hard drive:
<https://www.google.com/#q=500gb+external+hard+drive>
That will allow you to image & backup your old machine (dd or gparted)
to the external drive. You'll then be able to connect to the new machine
& copy and/or rsync grsync files/directories as you need them.

3. Setup remote desktop both for Ubuntu, for WinXP (for WinXP & Win
8.1/7 I use UltraVNC) and for the new machine. This will enable you to
allow someone you trust to come in and assist if you run into trouble
and/or figure you can't do it yourself.

4. If you've a strong enough 2005 machine (3-4GB of memory & a fairly
decent processor) I'd also recommend installing Win 8.1 in VMWare Player
and/or VirtualBox to familiarize yourself with that beast. Unless you
buy from a linux box dealer, everything that you buy will come with
Windows 8.1x, so you might at well familiarize yourself with it from the
start. This will allow you to boot up the new machine, know the basics
of how to use it (it's a *giant* leap from WinXP) use it, and *then*
configure. You can do this without any added expense by downloading and
installing Windows 8.1 IE dev virtual machine images. You can use these
in a VirtualBox or VMWare Player VM free of charge for 90 days & that
should give you sufficient time to familiarize yourself with Windows 8.
You can download from:
<https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools>
I do not have a Win8.1 machine, so the above helped me to understand the
OS/Desktop and to have an virtual machine that I could use to compare
with my brother's remote laptop.

Note to others that may chastise me for recommending Windows 8.1
familiarization: The realization is that there are many thousands of
folks out there with WinXP machines and/or older Ubuntu machines. Go buy
a new laptop/tablet/desktop and the fact of the matter is that it *will*
come with Windows 8.x on it. There is nothing worse that firing one of
these up and not knowing how to do step 1 of anything... or even knowing
how to turn one off/reboot without the power button.

You are welcome to contact me off-list if you've other questions. I
can't guarantee I'll reply in short order, but I'll be happy to respond
when I can.

Gary