Who dual boots Windows * with some sort of Linux

[Sysman]

Do you mean 50GB free space or 50GB in total? On my laptop WIndows 8 takes 30GB, not counting the three (!) recovery partitions.

I mean 50GB for the Windows installation, including hidden partitions. At the moment something like 16GB of that is free.

I then have a spare partition of 50GB on the same virtual disk in case I want to expand it in the future.

If you copy the lot to a different disk to (e.g. to expand it when you run out of room), that triggers the Windows 8 activation nonsense, which is a pain.

I'll probably do the opposite. I'll boot from Linux and mount the Win partition on Qemu-kvm.

I have not tried the qemu-KVM route so can't say how well it works.

[css_jay99]

as spacecadet says.

visualization is certainly the way to go and virtualbox is free.

I have a 16GB Mac mini server ruining a couple of windows2003 server vm's ...


css_jay99

[bobspud]

You are doing it the wrong way round...

Buy a mac book pro (750gb drive)
Buy parallels or VMware fusion

Install Windows <whatever> into a Bootcamp partition and then point you VM software at the bootcamp partition and it gives you an option to either run windows natively or inside a VM.

Now you have a unix OS for doing what you need and windows in a box to run crap like visio...

[petergriffin]

You are doing it the wrong way round...

Linux/Unix is my bread and butter. I need to have it running on the bare metal. I would dual boot or virtualize just to run the occasional Office.

[bobspud]

Linux/Unix is my bread and butter. I need to have it running on the bare metal. I would dual boot or virtualize just to run the occasional Office.

Now read what I just advised you to do again...

Buy a Mac Book Pro (Here is your unix OS for your bread and butter, although as an ex solaris engineer you are scaring me that you didn't know that Macs run unix...)
Now use Bootcamp to dual partition your Windows OS
Now if you want you can run a vmware or parallels hypervisor to run the Windows partition on the MAC-OSX primary..

Why is that so hard?

[d000hg]

MacOSX isn't Linux though, it's just Linux-like. Many things about it are different.

I don't know the fact you use Linux all the time means you need Linux to be the native OS though.

[stek]

MacOSX isn't Linux though, it's just Linux-like. Many things about it are different.

I don't know the fact you use Linux all the time means you need Linux to be the native OS though.

MacOSX is BSD based, and there are those of us who decry Linux as not Unix but Unix-like. And again, there are those who say AIX is not a 'proper' Unix since they break the 'everything is file' paradigm - the AIX ODM is a Berkeley DB I think....

I do feel Linux is a simpler concept to proprietary Unixes, since with IBM/AIX, PA-RISC/HP-UX and Sun (Oracle)/SPARC there's so much you can do with the hardware, LPAR/LDOM/vPAR etc, all done in firmware not an extra layer as per ESX etc...

[bobspud]

MacOSX is BSD based, and there are those of us who decry Linux as not Unix but Unix-like. And again, there are those who say AIX is not a 'proper' Unix since they break the 'everything is file' paradigm - the AIX ODM is a Berkeley DB I think....

I do feel Linux is a simpler concept to proprietary Unixes, since with IBM/AIX, PA-RISC/HP-UX and Sun (Oracle)/SPARC there's so much you can do with the hardware, LPAR/LDOM/vPAR etc, all done in firmware not an extra layer as per ESX etc...

^ this ^

Mac OSX was the best bits of next step with an even better UI.

I have not found anything that I need a Linux box to do for me that can't be handled by OSX. If I want to dick around with a cluster or something like that I can spawn an aws instance. (From my mac CLI coz that works too)

[petergriffin]

Buy a Mac Book Pro (Here is your unix OS for your bread and butter, although as an ex solaris engineer you are scaring me that you didn't know that Macs run unix...)

I've used (not owned) NeXt workstations back in the swinging '90s, so I am familiar with the concept. I don't rule out I will ever buy a Mac in the future but I need access to some tools that don't work on the Mac (Grub, Lilo, Sys-v-Init scripts, iptables) and I need to test them on the bare metal.

The beauty and also the limitation of virtualization is that many of the above mentioned tools can be implemented on the host machine without configuring the guest. You don't need a kernel to run a guest, you don't need to configure a firewall, you can get away with initialization scripts, etc.

While this is a great thing if you need a rough and ready system to go, it doesn't give you a clue if the system is broken until you test it on a real machine.

Up until 3-4 years ago I considered myself an expert because I had installed countless Linux distros on VMs, only to discover later that the configurations didn't work on the bare metal (different drivers, disk geometry and so on). I've learnt my lesson.

[bobspud]

I've used (not owned) NeXt workstations back in the swinging '90s, so I am familiar with the concept. I don't rule out I will ever buy a Mac in the future but I need access to some tools that don't work on the Mac (Grub, Lilo, Sys-v-Init scripts, iptables) and I need to test them on the bare metal.

The beauty and also the limitation of virtualization is that many of the above mentioned tools can be implemented on the host machine without configuring the guest. You don't need a kernel to run a guest, you don't need to configure a firewall, you can get away with initialization scripts, etc.

While this is a great thing if you need a rough and ready system to go, it doesn't give you a clue if the system is broken until you test it on a real machine.

Up until 3-4 years ago I considered myself an expert because I had installed countless Linux distros on VMs, only to discover later that the configurations didn't work on the bare metal (different drivers, disk geometry and so on). I've learnt my lesson.

Sounds like you are doing something wrong if you are having driver issues just because you are swapping out an emulator. I have never seen a problem like that. Normally the worst you will get is that you have NO internal disks and need the FC-HBA to load first or a god ******** awful dell PERC raid card that does need drivers added to the distro (or used to) the only way you can find that sort of stuff is buying servers on ebay then shipping them on when you are happy that you know stuff about them...

The best way to learn Linux is to start with Gentoo or Debian and then install the minimum image and build up the server from that point. A few years back I got to a level where I could knock up a postgres mail server with no more than about 100 meg of packages

I am really fed up with being an Architect at the moment so I am re learning my old skills. Today I am awaiting a book on chef and a ruby programming guide
Next week I will mostly be building MAS stacks for fun