Difference between revisions of "Migrating to Linux"

Revision as of 01:09, 17 October 2007

Want to start computing in Linux? Have a Windows system that you're not ready to give up? Hate the idea of dual-booting? Yeah, me too. Luckily for us, I think I've found a fairly nice solution.

NOTE: I haven't finished getting this to work yet - I started on 10/14/07. I'll document what I've done as I go with notes, and make a complete document when I'm done.

Summary

I have a laptop with an 80GB hard drive dedicated to Windows. I have purchased a new 160GB drive which I plan on installing both Windows and Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on. Sound like dual booting? Well, so far it is. Then through some trickery, I'm going to make it possible to be able to run Windows in a virtual machine (henceforth "VM"), but still make it possible to boot directly into Windows if the need arises. Using a VM makes sure that I can run any software designed for windows - not just the ones that work with a compatibility layer. Having dual-boot compatibility means that I can free up the resources used by the VM software and the host operating system if I want to.

After I get that working, I plan on looking into WINE, a Windows compatibility layer for Linux. Hopefully, I can use WINE to minimize the need for the VM. If I'm tricky enough, I might even be able to get it to use the same installation of Windows.

This is all very prone to accidental destruction of both operating systems, so I would suggest you not do this before backing up everything - say in a nice Notron Ghost image. No, I don't get a commission on plugging Ghost, it's just a nice tool.

Plan

Here's the overview of my plan:

1. Take a Ghost image of the current Windows hard drive (Norton Ghost is not free, but it is a tool any computer geek should definitely have.)
2. Install Windows on the new hard drive from the Ghost image
3. Install Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon (it's a beta now, but will be available as a full release by the end of the week)
4. Set up VMWare Server (available for free)
5. Set up Windows with hardware profiles to allow it to boot in both VM and standalone mode
6. Check and make sure everything works
7. Figure out if WINE can work somewhere in this system

The How-to

Like I mentioned earlier, I haven't actually finished this project yet. I have all the pieces, now I just need to put them together. Watch here for more details as the fun unfolds.

Notes

• used partimage instead of Norton Ghost - it's free, and it runs in Linux. Seems to work pretty well with NTFS
• needed to create an NTFS partition with gparted - had to install ntfstools to do that
• working on making Windows boot now...
• Windows boots - used Acronis bootable imaging tool to make the image