Creating a Windows/Linux Dual Boot System

Not that there is a shortage of this kind of information, but for those of you whom either cannot or will not convert from Microsucks, Windows to the awesome GNU/Linux platform, this post may help you out. Since I am currently doing exactly that, I'm going to blog the process, for the hell of it, so to speak.

Making the switch to Linux from Windows is generally pretty painless. However, there can be some minor, and irritating issues that must be addressed. In one case, the first words out of my clients mouth were "Eww I can't use Netflix?" ... Yes, you can totally use Netflix with Linux. Because Netflix depends on Microsucks Silverlight (which linux people hate), a sepperate Netflix browser must be installed. It used to be buggy, but it's come a long way. Another example of a compatability issue that has been fixed is using iPods with Linux. Yes, that is totally possible too. Again, it's just a matter of installing some extra software.

Anyway, if you want a dual boot system, you should install Windows first. If you already have Windows than you are in luck. If not, it is possible, but not really recommended to install Windows after installing a Linux system, because the ms-bootloader is a picky piece of sh**. So acquire a copy of your Windows distribution of choice (in most cases that would be Windows 7 Ultimate, because Windows 8 is a travesty), and go ahead and insert the disk into your machine. I'm not going to go into details about installing or acquiring Windows, so remember, Google is your best friend.

You should partition your hard disc during the Windows install to leave room for you Linux installation, unless you already have Windows, in which case the Linux installer can take care of that for you, but it will take a little longer because partitions must be shrunk, and that is time consuming. In this case, I am installing Win 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a 160 gig hard drive. The partition was be set up like this:

About 70 gigs was dedicated to Windows, and the rest was left unformatted for the Ubuntu installation. This was easily accomplished using the Windows installers partitioning tools. After booting to Windows, I then inserted the Linux Ubuntu disc, and restarted the computer. The computer was pre-set to boot to optical media if present. I manually partitioned the hard disc to give Linux about 8 gigs of disc space for swap, because this particular machine has 8 gigs of ram. a RAM/swap 1:1 ratio is a good rule of thumb. So I ended up with about 69 gigs for Linux, 8 for Swap, and the rest for Windows.

But upon rebooting the computer, it went straight to Windows. We need a bootloader to select which operating system to boot to. The natural choice is GRUB (the default Debian bootloader). For some reason it was not properly installed. So, I turned to boot repair disc! This is a very magical tool, and it flawlessly gave me the grub!

Next on the list is beefing up the security of the system. For some reason, spyware has made it even into some open source software these days. Every time I install Ubuntu on a computer, I remove the programs 'popularity-contest' and 'zeitgeist'. They do no good for anyone, and only serve to spy on you.

So, after installing Ubunut, open a terminal and do this:

sudo apt-get purge popularity-contest

And then,

ps -ef | grep zeit

Remove any packages it finds, be careful though. You can screw your system up if you accidentally purge something that is actually useful! (The two main ones are "zeitgeist" and "zeitgeist-core".) Enable the firewall:

sudo ufw enable

...and enjoy your new dual boot Win/Linux system! That's all for today.