Linux Format forums

[number1scatterbrain]

Can anyone recommend a clear explanation of how to go about dual-booting Linux with Windows Vista on an HP notebook?. There is a thread in one of the LXF Forums, but I'd like some more information before I take the Next Big Step. Apparently Vista has some mysterious method of reading CHS geometry that isn't fully understood.

[nelz]

Please don't shout, especially at 4am.

Most Linux distros will take care of this automatically, defrag in Vista then boot your chosen distro's CD and run the installer. /most will resize the Vista partition and create those necessary for themselves with minimal input from you, and then set up the bootloader to dual boot. If you tell us which distro (quietly) we could be more specific.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

[number1scatterbrain]

I never connected bold font with shouting. My eyes aren't the best, that's why I tend to use "louder" font. Thanks for your reply.

[towy71]

if you hit Ctrl++ the font size in your browser will increase in size which might make seeing it better
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still looking for that door into summer

[number1scatterbrain]

[Marrea]

There's quite a good tutorial here.

Last June I bought a laptop with Vista pre-installed and played around with, first, dual-booting Vista and XP and, second, triple-booting with Linux but gave up on Linux in the end because none of the distros I tried (and I installed a good few) would shut the laptop down, no matter what kernel parameters I tried - and that drives me mad. So I now use it for dual-booting Vista and XP.

Be warned though that Vista is a slightly different beast from XP as regards dual-booting. When I was playing around with it I used a utility called EasyBCD which worked quite well. This saves you having to struggle with the text-based bcdedit program, which takes some getting used to. But hopefully you won't need to get involved in that as Grub should work perfectly well.

[number1scatterbrain]

I was in Wales (Flintshire/Mold) 10 years ago playing rugby(I'm from Pittsburgh in the US). We had a great time,
except for the final score, 64-10. Snowdonia was beautiful.

[number1scatterbrain]

Thank you, Marrea,. Yes I've been reading about Vista's contrariness when dual-booting is attempted. Is there anyone who can advise as to whether it's better to dual-boot or perhaps to run Linux under Vista with Xen, as a virtual machine? Perhaps that's the best solution, but I'm very leery of experimenting with my only install of Vista. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I do want to keep an install of Vista for reference purposes.

[nelz]

When I bought this Advent laptop a few months ago, I used the option to create a recovery DVD, then ran the Ubuntu installer and everything Just Worked[tm], even the wireless and ACPI stuff.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

[Marrea]

[number1scatterbrain]

[quote="Marrea"][quote="number1scatterbrain"]Is there anyone who can advise as to whether itThanks again. Performance is important. I want to use Linux and my notebook as a guitar synthesizer instead of paying $900 US for a Roland guitar synthesizer. The other challenge will be connecting the hexaphonic guitar pickup with the notebook's soundcard, and then running it to an amplifier.

[towy71]

I would think that as you are wanting music oriented stuff you should look at dynebolic which is

[number1scatterbrain]

Thank you very much for the heads-up, towy71. Do you happen to know if anyone has created a real-time multi-instrument synthesizer, triggered by MIDI, with dynebolic? I will browse the dynebolic site, but anything you can tell me would be greatly appreciated.

[number1scatterbrain]

I've just found the ZynAddSubFX section of Dyne:bolic's website, and it looks very promising. Thanks again!