Bob, dual-booting is a real pain in the bohunkus for making the transition from Windows to Linux. Not that many have not done it that way, but running Linux on a virtual machine atop Windows works very well. Big advantages are that you can use both operating systems concurrently, share data partitions and the integrate the clipboards between the two systems, etc. And it's a keyboard shortcut to switch back and forth.
I've got two boxes, the older 32-bit machine that's running WinXP Pro natively and Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit as the guest OS. The newer system is running Xubuntu 64-bit natively and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as the guest OS. Both machines are running with 2 GB of DDR2 RAM. Win 7 is a fresh install and runs very slow as a guest so far, although I haven't begun tweaking the memory alllocation between the systems. But I may need to add RAM to that machine. On the 32-bit machine, Ubuntu runs quite fast as a guest. Of the free virtual machines, some -- perhaps most on this list -- prefer VMWare as the virtual machine. VMWare Player <http://www.vmware.com/products/player/>. I see that it looks far easier to install an OS on than it used to be when I was looking for a VM. I may give it another try. I use Sun's (now Oracle's) Virtual Box because it was easier for me to install and configure an OS using it a couple of years back. <http://www.virtualbox.org/>. I am far from being a hacker but was able to set up both systems with some studying of documentation and a bit of experimentation. And it really beats dual-booting. Best regards, Paul -- Universal Interoperability Council <http:www.universal-interop-council.org> _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
