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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Linux Switching Week!! | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Linux Switching Week!!
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 04:19 PM EDT
Yes you can share the swap partitions. In most (all?) distros, when Linux
boots, at some point it turns swap on for all partitions marked as swap. If you
have swap partitions on multiple hard disks it is even smart enough to use
striping to speed it up.

BTW rather than multi-booting, I would suggest you pick a primary distro and use
VM's. There isn't a whole lot you miss from booting the distro natively.
Unless of course you want to run Windows games.. but now with Steam on Linux
that need is going away. Its still worth playing good old UT2004 though ;)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Linux Switching Week!!
Authored by: jplatt39 on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 04:23 PM EDT
I do use the same swap partion -- also the same /home and /boot partitions -- on
my Slackware/Gentoo dual boot. You might look up swapfiles though. I've played
with them but keep using the old familiar swap partition.

Oh and be careful. You do need the same boot loader on both. Grub2 is
available from Slackbuilds.org but Slackware loves lilo. And grub2 can be a
pain. I'm still trying to figure out how to get it to recognize that / on my
gentoo kernels is /devs/sda2 and on my slackware kernels is /dev/sda3.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Linux Switching Week!!
Authored by: squib on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 05:25 PM EDT
It wasn't until I had a machine running just one Linux distro that I realised
how much time I was wasting on maintaining M$. I suggest that you get, borrow
or steal a machine and just load Linux on it. If any problem occurs on the
Linux machine it's then obliviously down to Linux. If a problem occurs on the M$
machine, it's then obliviously down to M$. You then, don't have to force
yourself to learn Linux... you naturally drift over to OS that most suits you
– because it work when you want it to and doesn’t throw a wobbly at the most
inconvenient times. Which M$ can do even when your running Linux on it in a VM.
The only use I find for M$ today is to hang the installation CD's up in my
cherry trees to ward of the starling – and still the installation discs fail,
to even do that simple job effectively (maybe I should try SCO discs but I
would then probably have the animal rights lobbyists on my door step for using
inhumane vermin control).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Sharing /home
Authored by: timkb4cq on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 08:35 PM EDT
Since a lot of configuration files are stored in hidden files & folders in
your /home directory you can get in trouble sharing it between two distros. The
problem being that you will almost certainly have different versions of certain
programs & sometimes the older version won't understand the new version's
config file.

I usually keep my /home on the root partition and use a separate /data partition
that is shared between distros, using symlinks in the various /home folders for
those things it is desirable & safe to automatically share.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

A word on swap partions.
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 01:14 AM EDT
As the swap partitions are generally not used to store data between boots they
are generally fine to share between distributions. There is however an exception
to this in that if you suspend to disk, it will store the data in swap, and if
you then proceed to boot into a different operating system, you will likely
corrupt that stored data if they share swap space. Easily avoided by being
careful of where you boot into or not using hibernate (suspend to disk) a lot,
but something to be aware of if you use hibernate a lot.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Congratulations!
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 08:59 AM EDT

Now if I can make one small suggestion?

Try to go cold turkey, no Windows at all, on the first week. If you can do that, do you really need a Windows partition?

If there is a particular Windows only package which has no Linux alternative, try running It under Wine. A lot of stuff which hasn't been officially tested works fine.

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

I don't like booting Windows.
Authored by: albert on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 02:53 PM EDT
Do your games require network access? If not, I would consider disconnecting the
network first. Win 7 probably phones home quite a lot. It wouldn't surprise me
if it didn't boot w/o a network.

I have dual boot Linux, one current Ubuntu, one upgrade Ubuntu (and a 'spare'
partition where XP used to be). The 'upgrade' allows me to test the OS before
committing to it. They are famous for breaking stuff on upgrades. Maybe with
Fedora, you'll be OK.

That said, I do miss Orcad, and the MS C++ IDE is quite nice. IMO, XP was the
last decent OS from MS.

Set up a small spare partition for experimenting. There are so many varieties
of Linux out there. Adding an additional HD is another option (a good place for
Windows, easy to install too.) I had OpenSolaris and Minix on one system, in
addition to XP and Ubuntu Linux.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

AeroSnap
Authored by: OpenSourceFTW on Saturday, March 30 2013 @ 01:01 AM EDT
One thing I really like in Windows 7 is the Aerosnap feature (where you can drag
windows to the side of the screen and have it take up half the screen). It's
really slick.

Any equivalent in KDE? I think I've gotten something somewhat similar working,
but it was kind of clunky.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Just installed
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 05:00 PM EDT
Just finished installing Win7 and Fedora 18 KDE 64-bit.
Decided against installing Slackware (I'll use a VM).

Man, KDE has gotten really slick. Has AeroSnap like behavior
(which I love). Fedora is running really smoothly at the
moment. I really think I'm going to enjoy this.

Working on installing all the updates, then I'll grab the
software I need.

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll keep you posted on how I'm
doing.

OpenSourceFTW- Not logged in.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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