[Coco] Dual boot

[Frank Swygert]

Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 08:24:42 -0500
From: Michael Graham<mkgraham at gmx.com>

Standard answer you'll get from almost everyone would be Ubuntu, but
I'll go ahead and say Linux Mint, this time.  It's Ubuntu-based, so
should have the same hardware support, and its desktop makes more sense
than Ubuntu's (with the Mint Menu and all).
--------------------------------------

Mint is great! I'm mainly a user, though I do understand enough about the command line to know what's going on when people talk about it, and can follow directions to make mods using the command line. I'm NOT real comfortable with the command line in Linux and prefer to use graphic front ends to do everything. Yeah, more like Windows and Mac, only NOT! Mint is perfect for that. The Mint developers wanted the system to be easy and ready to go. they have a lot of stuff that isn't open source but is still free to use, like graphic card drivers and audio/video codecs. I've been using it for some time now, do all my DTP with Linux (using GIMP for photo manipulation, PageStream for page layout).

When making a dual boot just make sure Windows is loaded first. It's a real chore to get it to work right if Linux was loaded first! It's the way Windows misbehaves. It always assumes it's the only OS (or at least the main OS) and overwrites the Linux boot loader. This can be patched back up, but save yourself a lot of trouble and load Windows first. Then the Windows boot loader will let you choose which OS to boot.

  I think the only reason MS put that feature (a boot loader) in starting with XP is because XP and later versions work a bit differently than previous versions -- people wanted to be able to boot Win95/2000 or XP (or later) for compatibility purposes. XP and Vista are different enough to cause problems with some hardware or software also.

See http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Ubuntu. Don't worry about that little warning if you have Windows installed first, it only applies if Linux was installed first.

Or this one: http://newfyworld.hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Dual-Boot-Linux-Mint-13-Maya-and-Windows-7VistaXP