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[Kirbo]

I just saw the Mac thread that got locked, and some people mentioned Ubuntu Linux. I've had the discs for a while, but I've put off installing them for one reason.

I use my laptop for work and for home, and at work (and soon enough at school) I need to have Windows, but I'd really like to try out Linux. Here's my question, is it possible to have Ubuntu on one partition, and have windows on another? If so, how do I do this. (Kind of a computer n00b, sorry).

[Samari]

it's very possible.  I do something like that on my laptop right now.  usually the website for the distro or the documentation on the disc will have instructions for how to do that.  I don't have any experience with ubuntu in particular but the bootloaders that come with distros now all support dual booting.

[edscoble]

do you have an external hard drive? it'd be more safer to boot Linux from the hard drive than your laptop hard drive, who know it might get corrupted? happen to me once when I made a mistake in Linux and now both my Windows and Linux partition is wonky, bastard.

[Kirbo]

No, no external. I'm probably going to grab one soon enough.

[decklin]

Yup! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WindowsDualBootHowTo

[Jenno]

Kirbo,

Before you install, check that your hardware is supported. Laptops are notoriously difficult to run Linux on due to all the proprietary nastiness present in most of them.

[edscoble]

Kirbo,

Before you install, check that your hardware is supported. Laptops are notoriously difficult to run Linux on due to all the proprietary nastiness present in most of them.

a little too late aren't you? now my DELL Inspiron is now redundant.

[M3gaBigh]

Yeah, What Jenno said. Setting up a dual boot is dificult to start with, using a laptop makes it a bit harder. That being said Linux is getting better and better all the time to support new hardware. A word of advice from personal experiance, Windows XP is fussier than Linux in terms of getting it all working together. Just read all the guides and you should be fine.

[Kirbo]

Good advice, I'm failry sure that my lappy runs Ubuntu fine.

I won't be able to test until this weekend, because if I do fuck things up, I'll need a day to get it all working again before work starts.

[M3gaBigh]

if your partition gets corrupted you can easily format it and start over. So on that note another word of advice: back everything up, it's easier to actualy start off from a blank HDD anyway.

[edscoble]

if your partition gets corrupted you can easily format it and start over. So on that note another word of advice: back everything up, it's easier to actualy start off from a blank HDD anyway.

actually I think I remember you can boot Ubuntu from CD?

I booted OS X from DVD when my laptop was dodgy

[elcapitan]

Yeah, try a LiveCD first. See if you like it enough.

I'm working on a project this year involving Ubuntu and Xen paravirtualisation  for scientific computing on a cluster, and Ubuntu has (so far) stood up to the test. It's certainly been a lot easier to deal with than Gentoo, which is what I use for my dual-boot machine at home.

Seriously. Gentoo is an awesome learning experience, but as a day-to-day OS? Not until it learns to stop sneakily putting new versions of toolchain components in random emerges.

[nihilist]

Don't unmask the ~x86 architecture, and you won't have problems.  Or find a stable version of the toolchain that you like, and lock out everything else.

[elcapitan]

I actually had to unmask some of the ~x86 architecture for some reason while building the system - that might have caused some chaos.

How would I go about "locking out everything else"?

[nihilist]

Find out the version of the toolchain you have (gcc/glibc/kernel/etc), and then mask them in /etc/portage/package.mask

To mask anything over gcc-3.4.6-r1, you'd do something like this:
>sys-devel/gcc-3.4.6-r1

That way you can stick with things, regardless of whether new packages come out.  Also, you should be pretty careful about when you do an upgrade...  Always pretend first, see what might be installed, etc.