Formatting my laptop to be Win7/Ubuntu

[Jackolantern]

So something has gone crazy with my laptop, weird things keep happening and it restarts every time I try to do a virus scan haha! It is probably from the last 18+ months of abusing the crap out of it with all of the craziness I load on it ("Oooo, new programming tool! Where did it come from? Who cares, lets install it!"). So now I am going to format it and reinstall Windows 7 64-bit on it, but I am wanting to partition the hard drive and set up a dual-boot with Ubuntu 32-bit. I am wanting the 32-bit of Ubuntu since I hear most programs and packages are tested on it mainly, and some packages don't even have 64-bit versions. I don't see why it would be a problem, since obviously my hardware can run 32-bit OS', and there really shouldn't be much interaction between them.

Here is the guide I am going to follow to set up a dual-boot between them and leave a large portion of the hard drive "shared" between both OS'. Has anyone done this before that has any tips? Anyone see any problem in the procedure here (not that I am asking everyone to read the whole thing, as it is long, but I guess this question ties into the tips, so if you know of something, and happen to see it not listed in that guide...)? Does anyone know of any problem with having the shared disk space between Windows 7 64-bit and Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit? Thanks!

[fang]

That guide is a few years old; you might want to look around for a newer one. I'm fairly certain that newer linux grub will automatically find windows installations and list them without any extra work (install windows first/free up disk space; install linux and you're good to go). You should probably check that before you do it.

Personally, I'd recommend xubuntu or debian. Vanilla ubuntu comes with a lot of cruft, and they get most of their packages from debian anyway.

I don't know how familiar you are with linux, but package management alone is a godsend, and the shells are beautiful. It's also excellent for python, ruby, and node.js development (I generally don't touch python in a windows environment, but it's my first choice in linux).

The two OS shouldn't really 'share' any space; they'll be on separate partitions. If you use any filesystem other than NTFS or FAT32 (you really shouldn't use these two), windows will not be able to read the linux partition, however you will be able to mount the windows partition inside of linux and read/write it.

So, for example if you use linux for web development, save the files on the windows partition and you'll have them available for both.

If there is anything I can help with let me know; I exclusively work on linux boxes these days unless a client needs a native windows app.

[Jackolantern]

Thanks for all the advice!

Honestly, I know pretty little about Linux. There are some development things I had wanted it for, beyond the want to learn it due to its importance in web and other development.

I did see that the guide was quite old at this point, but what had drawn me to it was that it covered how to make a shared area for both OS', but I actually remembered that the reason I was wanting that before was because I was previously going to install a command-line only Linux and did not want to use VIM to write code or have to write it without easy access to a web browser. But with a GUI-based Linux, I am not so concerned with sharing the files, since I could get much more advanced IDEs in the graphical environment and have a browser available while coding. At that point, I could hopefully just share them with a USB drive or even through email if I needed to. So I am realizing that is much lower on the priority list for now. I will probably just go totally isolated for now, since that will probably be easier to manage for a first time Linux installation. Should I still install Windows first, or does it not really matter so much if you are putting them in their own partitions, completely separate?

[fang]

If you're going for a clean install, you've got room to play so go for it. The only risky part is losing data, so as long as that's all backed up don't be afraid to go for it.

When you install windows, it will install it's bootloader, which will only boot into windows.
When you install linux, it will install GRUB, a really nice bootloader that will give you an operating system list on startup with a default it'll go into after a few seconds. Most modern linux installs should configure it to automatically detect windows.

Whichever you install last will overwrite the bootloader (there might be an option in linux to skip it, but then you won't be able to boot into linux from the windows one), so you'll want to install windows first and then linux.

There is a special directory in linux, /dev , that lists your devices. Hard drives/partitions are hdaX, sdaX, and sdbX, where X is a number. You'll be able to mount your windows partition inside of linux using the mount command, and will have read/write access to it as if it were any other directory.

The command will need to be modified, but as an example:

sudo mkdir /media/windows
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/windows
// sudo -- SuperUser do -- basically run as admin/root user
// mkdir -- make directory
// mount -- mount a device's fs to a directory

will mount the ntfs filesystem on sdb1 to the /media/windows directory, and if you run
ls /media/windows
// ls -- list the contents of a directory
you'll see the same files as if you were in windows and ran
dir c:\
and have access to them just like any other files.

[Chris]

I tried to install CentOS on my laptop once. Couldn't find any working WiFi drivers.

[Jackolantern]

Thanks for all of the help, Fang!

And @Chris, I have wondered about things like drivers. I assumed it was probably all worked-out, though, since people need internet connections and their hardware to work correctly. I am hoping that everything goes smoothly.

And just to be clear, there is no issue with having 64-bit Windows 7 and 32-bit Linux on the same computer in their own partitions, correct?

[fang]

CentOS is really a free redhat based distro. They don't really have as large as a community as debian, so the support isn't quite as good and as such don't have as many packages and drivers available straight-away.

@Jackolantern: shouldn't be any problems there.

[Jackolantern]

Thanks!

And yeah, really the resources are why I was going with Ubuntu to begin with. Being new to Linux, it is nice to have hundreds of tutorials online, about a dozen recent books written just about Ubuntu I can consult, etc. My next Linux installation may be a bit more exotic, or something. For now I think I am just going with the "big boy", for better or for worse, just due to the fact that it will make it easier to learn and easier for a novice to work with it. I can totally believe that the distro with the largest userbase is not necessarily the best.

[Nexus]

I hate Ubuntu because of the new Unity desktop, I can deal with GNOME but I absolutely love KDE. But yeah Ubuntu is a great starter distro to get you to kinda see what you like in a distro.

[mattykins]

I had a winXP / Ubuntu dual boot on my pc a few years back, this wasn't for development purposes though because my pc had uh... Contracted a virus Anyways Ubuntu is a good operating system. As far as drivers go, most all drivers can be found through the package manager(I think that it is called this but i'm not 100% sure because I haven't used Ubuntu in forever) which is basically the app store for ubuntu, yet the sell everything, and from what I remember nothing costs money, but again i'm not 100% sure on this point.

For the short 3 or 4 months that i used ubuntu it served me well, however this was way before I got into any sort of coding or development. So i sadly cannot give my opinion on that lol.