[wplug] Dual boot - what's the big deal?

[Coutch, Robert]

OK,

I finally broke down and decided to make my home desk top PC a dual boot
system.

I've been running SuSE 7.3 on it for quite some time with no problems.
I added a Yamaha Sound card because ALSA didn't recognize my onboard sound
but other than that, everything worked great.

I wanted to see how a more "up to date" OS would be and hopefully pick up
some extra USB capabilities (camera's mainly).

I use my home machine for web design/editing, web browsing, TV watching,
game playing (Quake 2 and 3, Heretic 2, etc.) and other misc tasks.

I only had 3 partitions on my 40Gb drive (/, /home and swap) so I had to
resize partitions and move them around a bit.

I used a combo of resize_reiserfs, parted and fdisk to resize and relocate
my reiser and swap partitions. It went better than I thought it would.
I lost none of my / partition and all of my /home partition due to changing
the LBA settings in BIOS before doing all this. Good thing I backed up /home
before starting.

After resizing and moving my current patitions I was left with 10Gb
available on /dev/hda4 for my second OS.

I installed Red Hat 8.0 (you didn't think I was adding Win...Win....Win.. I
can't even say it !) on /dev/hda4 and have been fine tuning it over the past
few days.
The SDL on RH8 doesn't play well with my Loki games so I can't get sound on
Quake3 or Heretic2. I'll keep trying.
RH 8 did pick up my onboard sound which was a nice surprise.

Here are some things I learned along the way.

1 - Never change your LBA settings in BIOS just before resizing/moving
partitions unless you have a backup.
2 - It's a LOT easier to resize and move ext2/3 partitions than reiser ones
because there are a lot more tools for ext2/3.
3 - Never expect to get Nvidia cards to use accelerated features without a
visit to Nvidia's website for their closed source drivers (which is still
better than NO drivers).
4 - SuSE still puts more useful packages for a desktop PC in their personal
edition than Red Hat does (in my opinion). (I still like them both for
different reasons)
5 - lilo doesn't work exactly like you think it should. It took a couple of
changes to get RH 8 to load with it's own kernel instead of SuSE's.

It's neat to have an updated OS with all the latest versions of software but
I didn't really gain anything except the ability to download photo's from my
sister-in-law's Kodak camera.

So what's the big deal about dual booting? Well, at least I can say I tried
it.


If you don't wish to hear my ramblings, please disregard this email.

	- otherwise -

Thanks for listening,

Bob 


P.S. - Is anyone out there using the latest version of FreeBSD?  What's your
opinion of it?