Posted on Wednesday 11th of October 2006 at 12:25 in Linux

Are You Scared of Dual Booting Linux?

An excellent question it seems even when my personal experiences are put aside - a friend of mine over in Norway attempted to dual boot everyone's favourite distro (Ubuntu) on his laptop with fairly disastrous results. Specifically, a crashing while managing the partitions created an expensive paperweight. While I doubt this situation isn't reversible (as that isn't the point of this article), I wonder how many people are actually scared of dual booting Linux.

While initial searches of Google don't convey this to be a serious problem or concern I am aware that myself and those around me have experienced problems doing this (theoretically) simple action, mostly with semi-devastating consequences. The commonly available resources discuss how simple a procedure this is, with image heavy tutorials and even video step-by-step guides. I've not seen a step-by-step account of how epically things can go wrong.

Live CD Environment Install
One of my concerns with the latest editions of Ubuntu (I'm unsure of the other distros at this point) are the new installation methods where you boot to the live CD environment and double click an installation icon where you're lead through a GUI installation. I'm curious as to how stable this method is since my Norwegian friend suffered a Dapper Drake related spannerism.

While some people will surely respond saying that you can download an alternate installation disk that uses the traditional text based installer (the one that spooned my system a good while ago...) and I say to those people - that's just not good enough. If you're going to move forwards and create a GUI installation process, it's best to at least integrate a text-only option into that, surely? My time is fairly limited and when I decide to install an operating system I want to do it then, not to be faced by a problem that I cannot solve until my interminably slow broadband finishes downloading another CD.

So What?
What I'm looking for is a bit of a vote on the subject. Have you ever attempted to dual boot Linux - it doesn't have to be a new distro but it needs to be in a real live environment (no Virtual machines guys). Did you have any problems? Let me know!

Where to Vote
You can vote from the homepage, so please go and have your say. Please leave comments on the subject because I'd like to hear from you and see how widespread the problem actually is, or whether me and those around me have been unfortunate/inept.

 

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