[sf-lug] dual-boot

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> Mostly I agree with that, and I don't have dual-boot on any of my
> current machines (for the last two laptops, I was lucky enough to
> find laptops that came with Ubuntu instead of Windows, but that
> isn't always an option).

There are numerous edge cases, such as:

> But before that, I usually did keep a dual-boot of the OEM Windows,
> in case I should have a need for a program or driver that wasn't
> available on Linux.

That one.

Another is that you intentionally are going to spend 99% of your time in
one OS and need the one exception codebase so very rarely that it's
perfectly OK to need to shut everything down and reboot to the other OS,
because you're doing it so seldom.  

Another is that the machine is so deficient on RAM or (rarely) CPU that
virtualisation isn't feasible, and either you cannot expand the hardware
or it's just not worth the extra expense.

> I spent many hours trying to find a way to put that OEM Windows inside
> a VM somehow, and never found one.

We've recently discussed this exact problem on CABAL's Conspire mailing
list.  Using VMware's p2c tool[1], you can image the preload, and then that
image can run in VirtualBox or VMware (maybe other hypervisors, too).

That aside, personally, IMO you _don't really own_ any OS you cannot
reinstall when/if the hard drive fails.  So, if I were relying on
MS-Windows, I'd find a way to get a cheap copy of the full retail
version, and not just rely on the preloaded version that cannot be
reinstalled and is living on borrowed time.  Hard drives fail.

I've also seen many really quite bad OEM preloads, bad in a variety of
ways, starting with the bundled ratware from every crummy third-party
vendor willing to pay to put their intro/reduced-functionality versions 
into it.  Me, I wouldn't want to even trust an OEM preload OS at all, if
I could possibly help it.  I'd want to start with a known-good full
version and install it myself -- and that has always been what I've 
done in such situations.


> Call me cheap (and you'd be right) but it also bothers me in
> principle. So that's one use case for dual-boot.

Of course, you could still have done virtualisation the _icky_ way, with
the Microsoft OS run as the native software, and Linux in the VM.  But
using the tool I mentioned averts the need for that sad choice.


[1] This one, I think:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=converter
IIRC, the output format is VMware VMDK/VMX, which at mininum VirtualBox 
can also use.  You would of course want to have a big external drive to
hold the image file copy, but then you are going to want to have a few
of those around, anyway.  Useful tutorial:  
http://www.howtogeek.com/125640/how-to-convert-virtual-machines-between-virtualbox-and-vmware/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1505021/virtualbox-and-vmdk-vmx-files