Knights & Knaves Alehouse

olaberg wrote:

SemajTheSilent wrote: If you mean "can the linux OS read what's on a windows partition?" then yes.

But don't expect Linux to be able to WRITE to your XP partition. Most probably, XP is installed on a file system that can be read by but not written by Linux.

Yes, exactly.

I don't dual boot myself, but one or two friends of mine do-they use Win98 SE instead of XP. Linux can't seem to write to anything with an NT kernel, but interacts with DOS (the Win98 kernel) just fine.

order99 wrote:I don't dual boot myself, but one or two friends of mine do-they use Win98 SE instead of XP. Linux can't seem to write to anything with an NT kernel, but interacts with DOS (the Win98 kernel) just fine.

Maybe if one installed Win2K on a FAT partition. . . .

It can read a NTFS partition too.

SemajTheSilent wrote:It can read a NTFS partition too.

Right, I was thinking writing to the partition.

Here's a how-to on creating a shared partition that both Windows and Linux can both read and write.

order99 wrote:Edmunds Enterprises of America(my favorite place to grab 3 or 4 distros when I want to play with new toys and want to spend about $10 or so).

So you run more than one distro? Do you need a multiboot utility?

Nope. With the old Mac and OS9 as my main box, I just wipe the PC drive and load a distro from scratch ...gives me a chance to just play with all the toys.

(I know, i've got a 1.5G PC and I use an old G3 350 as my main box-i'm weird, I accept that)

Now if I wanted to use multiple Linux distros, i'd just leave a little partition space, load a reliable distro with a proven bootloader(most likely Fedora or Xandros) and then load the other and use the first bootloader.Chaining multiple Linux distros is pretty easy in theory-the only problem I could forsee is if you try to load an ancient distro with Ext2 format onto an Ext3 or different, newer format. Most Linux bootloaders handle switchboots just fine.

In practice though, I don't see a benefit in multiple linux distros...just load the one you want,look for your favorite apps and go. Apps are usually written in several of the popular formats(RPM, .deb and good ol .tgz) so just find one you really like and you can get pretty much the same apps for all.

You can even find a lot of this stuff for your Windows OS as well-some really popular stuff(Firefox, Mplayer etc.) got its start as Linux/Unix ware and was backported to .exe format!

SemajTheSilent wrote:If you mean "can the linux OS read what's on a windows partition?" then yes.

In the linux partition, you can mount the windows partition then have a look over there... copy it over to the linux partition, for example.

You can mount FAT and FAT32 partitions read/write with no problems. The current NTFS driver for 2.6 has an almost-reliable write mode now, but if you really need to write to it, you can install FUSE and ntfstools, which is pretty stable. However, the most reliable way to access an NTFS drive from a dual-boot system under Linux is with Captive NTFS. It's a driver that will actually load the NTFS.SYS (I think that's the name) module from Windows to ensure correct reading and writing. It seems rather freaky to me, but it does apparently work.

SemajTheSilent wrote:ETA: but if you're looking for windows to read what's on a linux partition, you're out of luck.

Actually, there is software for reading and writing EXT2 partitions under Windows, though you can't mount them as filesystems. I'm told the same software can handle EXT3 and EXT4, but I don't know how true that is.

I use ReiserFS pretty much all the time, and I believe you have to pay someone to access Reiser partitions under Windows. Dunno really, it hasn't come up.

Now that's useful information. Thank you.

With the price of the Vista upgrade hovering around $250, Microsoft has assured my next OS is Linux. I did purchase O'Reilly's Running Linux book with an eye toward setting up a server, but now I'll also use it to aid with client installations.

I wasn't a Microsoft hatah before, but was more of a Microsoft ambivalatah. Still not a hatah, but now more of a WTF-ah are they thinking? Do they really not understand just how easy peasy it is to install/run Linux? I'm sure they just feel very secure in their currently #1 OS ivory tower.

Hubris before the fall, no?