Dual booting

My timing was just right.

I’d decided to start dual booting again, running Windows XP Professional (I’ve no interest in running Vista) and a Linux distribution of some sort.

So I bought a couple of Linux magazines to find out how much things had moved on since I used to dabble with Red Hat Linux, around four or five years ago. I thought Ubuntu looked worth trying, but I had a problem with the download hanging at around 98% mark. I could’ve tried another server, but persevered. The download never finished, and I went off to reconsider…

Two days later, Ubuntu 7.04 was released! I tried the Live CD which downloaded without a hitch, liked it, and installed it on my hard drive. Then I realised that I’d have preferred to use Kubuntu (I didn’t know that there were several variants of Ubuntu). I installed the K Desktop Environment (KDE) package on top of Ubuntu, and it works flawlessly.

If you’re not sure about installing Linux, try one of the Live CD versions first. One thing that really makes life easier: if you’re using online services such as Gmail, Google Reader, and del.icio.us, rather than running a Windows email client and saving your bookmarks locally, you’ll be able to access all of your email and bookmarks on either platform. Firefox, together with most of its extensions like the excellent Groowe Search Toolbar work beautifully on both platforms too. It’s great to be able to boot into either operating system and have access to all of your mail and bookmarks. Just be careful if you decide to dualboot that you don’t overwrite your Windows partitions.