A few days ago, I set up my new(ish) Dell Inspirion 1525 to triple boot Windows Vista Home Premium (the pre-installed OS), Windows XP SP3, and Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex, a flavor of Linux). Warning: If you are already confused, you may wish to gloss over this post. It may be fairly geek driven.

Being a computer repair wizard in my spare time, I figured it would be good for me to garner some experience on the Vista platform even though I don’t particularly care for it. I enjoy playing around with Linux and Ubuntu flavors just make that transition even easier. I still need XP for compatibility issues on contract work, though. I figure,”Hey! I’ve been multi-booting for several years now. This should be cake to set up.” Well I was wrong. Microsoft has taken something that should be an easy task and tried to make it impossible. Of course I should have expected that. Why wouldn’t I? Because I figure people would actually think before they do things. I’m an optimist. It kills me.

If you’ve ever wanted to set up a multi-boot system: AVOID MICROSOFT AT ALL COSTS!

Note that I hate all caps, but this is the only way for me to show how much I mean that last little part.

Microsoft has no intention of letting anyone boot multiple operating systems, even if it is multiple of their own. I was able to easily re-size the Vista partition and add in Linux. It uses it’s own boot-strap and GRUB boot menu that doesn’t interfere with ntldr. Vista and XP, however, have two DIFFERENT ntldr files that cannot coexist on the same partition though. “Why does this matter?”, you may ask. Well, as I found out over two days of partitioning and installing, even though you create two separate primary installations for your operating systems to inhabit in their hermatic bliss, whatever Windows operating system is not on the first primary partition does not install its version of ntldr on its own partition. Like a fool, it assumes that it is going to be the ONLY possible OS installed and writes it’s ntldr file to the first partition (erasing one that already happens to be there). Oh, but this is an easy fix, right? Yeah, but it is not something that is obvious or really discussed anywhere easy to find out in the cold recesses of cyberspace. The Vista disk has a nice feature that will automatically replace the “corrupt” ntldr file, you just need to remember to open the command line utility from the same disk and copy the XP ntldr over to its own partition first. Then there is still the issue of the boot menu once you get the boot loader file issue sorted out. This is what all the forums already discuss. Never mind the fact that you need a boot loader before the menu can boot to a partition. If you are actually using this post as a guide, I recommend EasyBCD from NeoSmart Technologies. It is free and it worked exactly as I needed.You could try to let the Vista boot disk automatically, but I don’t see you getting anywhere with THAT. Do you?

Of course if you are going to install ANY flavor of Linux, just let GRUB do that dirty work. Worst case scenario there is that you have to use a GRUB editor that is easily found with your package manager to modify your GRUB settings. Just make sure you install your Microsoft stuff FIRST. The Vista disk seemed incompetent at removing third party boot loaders, but the XP disk will easily screw with your GRUB files. If you are not an advanced computer user, I do not recommend getting frustrated on attempting this at all. Just call in some help and ask for lots of pointers along the way!

So I have been playing on Ubuntu and Kubuntu in what little precious spare time I’ve had in the past few months. It seems to be a very visually pleasing and user friendly foray into the world of Linux, especially for someone who is venturing out for the first time. For all of you Mac fans that are still reading, I would recommend Kubuntu for you if you are curious about Linux. It has a very OSX feel and can even be set up to look virtually identical (Debian is as Debian does).

While I have appreciated the ease of use, I came upon a roadblock the other day. I have a use for a Linux installation at one of my jobs. I am not trying to hack into anything, I am a network and computer administrator there and I want an OS that most people will not be able to mess with things on. If I could have it just be able to run Citrix and thats it, it would be perfect. I thought Linux. And since I had Kubuntu on hand, what the hay? I go to install it and it is so sluggish that I can’t really install it even. Now this is on a PII 400 with 128MB of ram, but I figured that Linux is supposed to be small and versatile. Apparently not when it looks pretty. So I started looking for alternatives with smaller footprints. One such flavor was PCLinuxOS. First I thought that it had to be some sort of joke or a bad implementation with a name like that, but it was just a single LiveCD instead of 3 to 6 installation disks, so I gave it a shot. And it seemed to run OK. I did have to increase the ram to 196MB for the LiveCD to load a little better, but the distro itself is clean and lean. I got to my other job Monday where I have a more powerful desktop to play with and I loaded it to a virtual machine called Qemu that I happened to already have. The KDE xwindow desktop manager is implemented very cleanly and I didn’t have any trouble using the package manager to install a few test packages (As long as the packages where there. Apparently one of the hosts was down, but I didn’t fault the software.). Last night I even got to see the much anticipated Beryl in action in all its beauty on my laptop. It ran wonderfully even from the LiveCD environment.

While PCLinuxOS is still a very pleasing package to look at, don’t expect it to come with as many frills as Kubuntu. It is much more the basic installation that is being left for customization by the user. Not even a game comes preloaded on this distro. I would put this distro on the next level up from the Ubuntu family in terms of skill requirements. It is still very easy to install and get going, but you need to have time, patience and knowledge to manage the installation of more packages.

I am still looking for the leanest and lightest distro for that PII 400 system though. If anyone has any suggestions, please add a comment! Yes we ask you to register, but it is free and we don’t do ANYTHING with user info. I hate marketing companies, so they can go somewhere else to build their stupid databases!