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mazmac24

What operating system are you happy with?  

141 members have voted

  1. 1.

    • Windows
      34
    • Mac
      7
    • Linux
      30


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I'm starting to really hate grub.

It doesn't work with a number of filesystems (most notably, Reiser4), and I also never managed to get it to install on a RAID1 partition.

Lilo has no problems with either.

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i know how to use linux just fine, but the amount of setup to get it working with the same effectiveness is larger and you cannot denie that, things like speedstep all the little nitty gritty things you probably dont think about also a big thing for me was boot up time and software suspend which is to slow for my liking. There are things i would use linux for and things i would use windows for, as far as my general use laptop goes, windows all the way.

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I am happy with windows. I have been messing around with linux latley just for the hell of it. I is a pretty cool OS and the dostro i am using(ubuntu) is pretty cool and easy to use. I use windows because i know it and because all of my favorite games run on it.

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I use windows primarily but use Linux on the side some just to mess around. Linux has alot going for it and with popular distros like Ubuntu it's gotten a hell of alot better over the years. That said, it still does take more effort / knowledge to get working properly.

Dual booting is the answer, and it's not difficult at all to setup. Every major linux distro can automatically set it up for you.

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You're probably best off with either a dual-boot setup, or something like VMWare that is basically an emulator for a PC.

Dual-boot involves creating at least 2 partitions on your disk, installing Windows on the one and Linux on the other, and installing a so-called bootloader that, as the system boots, will present you with a menu from where you can pick which OS to actually start.

VMWare, as an emulator, allows you to assign some resources to its virtual machine, and install the OS on there. So if you want the virtual machine to have 10 GB of diskspace (which, for Linux, is a lot), VMWare will create a 10 GB file in Windows and present that to the virtual machine as if it were a harddisk. In much the same way, you can assign, say, 128 MB of memory to the virtual machine, which can then be used by the OS running inside the virtual machine.

As long as the OS is running in VMWare, this memory will be in use. Once you stop VMWare (and thus, the OS running inside it), this memory will be returned to your machine for you to use at your leasure.

The advantage of VMWare is that you don't need to do any fancy stuff to your machine, like repartition your harddrive. The downside of VMWare is that it's an emulator, and because of this it will be slower than when you're dual-booting into the other OS. Note that VMWare is a commercial product, but they do provide the VMWare Player for free, and I'm sure you can find some VMWare OS images for Linux and such to play with. Everything will be pre-installed so you'd lose out there, but it should still provide a nice starting point for playing around with Linux.

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I'd say don't dule boot, it's a real, hassle, get two computer and two monitors or a KVM switch.

In the case of dual booting Windows with a *nix, just install Windows first and your installer for *nix should take care of autodetecting it and putting the Windows information in the lilo.conf or grub.conf.

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Then you'll definately want something like VMWare (Bochs perhaps? It's called differently these days. Google is your friend) as you can even suspend your OS and pick up where you left off later. Better yet, you can set it up that it won't commit any harddisk writes, so on the next boot you've got your original install back, regardless! :)

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In the case of dual booting Windows with a *nix, just install Windows first and your installer for *nix should take care of autodetecting it and putting the Windows information in the lilo.conf or grub.conf.

Never managed to get that to work, with Suse, a Slax varient or Ubuntu. Is there something you have to tell the installer to do? Or is it a case of if it works, it works, if not, go suck it down?

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Never managed to get that to work, with Suse, a Slax varient or Ubuntu. Is there something you have to tell the installer to do? Or is it a case of if it works, it works, if not, go suck it down?

I've never had a problem with it, and I install various distro's many times throughout the year. Generally when you're going through the setup menu you can choose empty space from your windows partition, or unformatted space to install everything to.

Usually I use something like partition magic and resize any existing partitions before I go to install linux. Often makes the process easier.

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