Thinkpads Forum

Decided to just try setting up a R51 with both Vista and Feisty on board. Seems to work ok at first glance.

This is my first ever dual boot attempt! Thought it would be neater than having to slide in another hard drive every time I want a different operating system.

My plan is to use one FAT32 partition for documents and access them from either Ubuntu or Vista. Will that work?

My questions are:

1: how do I gain permissions to I can change the drive names that can be seen by both operating systems?

2: can anybody suggest a decent tutorial on how to do SUDO without risking goofing myself up in the process?

I sorta, kinda got some experience with Linux, but I've decided to think about "escaping" from Microsoft as they become more and more "big-brother-ish"....
Many thanks.

Hi,

Way to go on giving a dual-boot setup a shot! I started out with Ubuntu several months back, and found it fairly beginner friendly. As far as getting permissions to view files on a FAT32 partition from inside Ubuntu, the second post at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=188449 will have some helpful information.

The basic idea is that you need to have entries in your fstab file to tell Ubuntu to recognize the partition. I recently had to edit my fstab when I forgot to setup my swap partition ( ) when installing Slackware to my 600x. A page that helped me quite a bit was: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html . After you've got the fstab entry, it's just a matter of The mountpoint is going to be the best way to keep in order what the partition is when between OS's, though since Windows uses a different method of organizing drives, it'll show up as "F:\" or whathave you. You could just name the mountpoint the same as the drive shows up in Windows, I suppose (maybe a bit different, like "F:/").

Regarding worrying about using sudo, I'm kind of split; on the one hand, it's not *quite* as easy to mess your system up as some would have you believe, though it is possible. Perhaps a good rule of thumb for you to follow is to only use sudo when you have been instructed to until you learn your way around the system and get a little bit of experience under your belt. On the other, I have to say that I've learned more about Linux by messing things up and figuring out how to fix them myself.

One thing that may make you a bit more comfortable is that the operating system should be installed in it's own partition, depending on how you set up your install. What this means for you is that it's not going to be as big a deal if you end up editing important config files, etc and get to a point to where you have to re-install. All of your personal files should be on a different partition altogether.

Hope that made sense, as it's a bit past my bedtime.

rampire wrote:Hi,

Way to go on giving a dual-boot setup a shot! I started out with Ubuntu several months back, and found it fairly beginner friendly. As far as getting permissions to view files on a FAT32 partition from inside Ubuntu, the second post at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=188449 will have some helpful information.

Ok, thanks for the tips and the links. I'll nose around in there tomorrow. So far I've managed to name my documents folder while on the Vista side of things, and Ubuntu recognizes the new name. That's the important FAT32 folder with my documents that I want to work with in both Linux and Windows. I really am not too concerned about renaming other partitions with the operating systems on board there.

Of course some of my files like the OneNote's .one files aren't compatible with Linux, but I notice that Open Office will handle MS Word docs, including reading tables of contents. I can also use my excel files in Linux, but some of the chart colors are a little goofy.

I notice that good old Acronis will backup and restore Linux files as well as Windows files, and that means I can do backups pretty easily.

I use RoboCopy for backing up my docs.

I got sold on Ubuntu because it would recognize my rather obscure NetGear PCMCIA Wi-Fi card for wireless internet access. Most other distros won't handle it.

I also really like how Ubuntu will auto download codecs & other things for multimedia files. Beats the heck out of the old Windows method!

Late to this, I guess (sorry). Your idea sounds like a good one - and I'll be upgrading my T42 to a T61 sometime soon so I'm thinking about this now as I will also dual boot.

Personally, I would use an NTFS partition for shared data rather than a FAT32. My understanding is that NTFS is much more robust if, for instance, the machine crashes while in the middle of reading or writing a file. With FAT, odds are you'd lose the entire partition or at least the file or folder.

Ubuntu can read NTFS so that's not a problem, and NTFS doesn't have the partition size limitations of FAT32. No reason, really, as far as I can see, not to go NTFS...

liteswap wrote: Ubuntu can read NTFS so that's not a problem, and NTFS doesn't have the partition size limitations of FAT32. No reason, really, as far as I can see, not to go NTFS...

Agreed...the latest Ubuntu distro (7.1) now reads NTFS with no problems. That makes it even more attractive to me as a operating system.