Dual Booting Windows 7 and Linux with EasyBCD

I decided to use Windows 7 bootloader instead GRUB to manage the dual boot.

I've been using GRUB before to manage Linux/Windows dual boot -- you need to edit the menu.lst file in the /boot folder under the Linux root partition; this time, I decided to give the Windows 7 bootloader a try.

Windows 7 uses the same bootloader as Windows Vista. One of the best tool for managing the bootloader is EasyBCD from NeoSmart

Interestingly, the easiest way to dual boot Linux (in my opinion)-- using the NeoGrub bootloader, is not well documented by the maker NeoSmart.

NeoGrub is made by NeoSmart as a bootloader within a bootloader. It can live anywhere on your Windows filesystem; you just make a reference to it inside EasyBCD. After you install NeoGrub from within EasyBCD, you want to click the Configure button and modify the menu.lst file (that's only way to modify it. the file is locked outside the program).

Just copy the boot entries from the old menu.lst file. (if you are wondering how in the world you would be able to reach the old menu.lst from inside Windows 7, you might want to read my old post on Ext2 IFS :) Those boot entries should look like the following:

title Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic
root=UUID=c28b6727-d0e5-46c1-93a8-9b336033ff05 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

Save the file and EasyBCD writes a new NeoGrub entry the into the Windows 7 bootloader for you. Done.



Result of the bootloader entries including the new NeoGrub entry:

Uninstalling KDE 4 -- Impressed with the Ubuntu package manager

There have been raves on the Internet about the Debian Package Manager used in Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

I can tell you it's even better than I imagined.

I've been trying the new KDE4 shell. Well, it's ok, but I really don't like it too much at this stage because I think it's still a little "green". So I decided to un-install it and go back to KDE3. Impossible, some might say, because of all the dependencies by other packages that I have installed which rely on KDE4.

Hey, what do you know? It CAN be done in simple steps:

1. Log into console mode. Makes sense, right?
2. Now remove all packages with names ending in kde4. sudo aptitude remove ~i~nkde4
3. Rebuild dependencies. sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm
4. Now make sure all the packages are up to date. sudo aptitude update
5. sudo aptitude upgrade. Done.

Isn't it cool? Now imagine doing this in Windows...

Installing Solaris 10 on VMWare server

I actually tried to install Solaris 10 straight up on a blank partition, but the install does not work because the Solaris requires its boot to be located on the first 1024 cylinders of a disk. Since I already have Windows XP and Kubuntu running on my two hard drives, I decided to try the VMWare approach instead.

The installation via VMWare running on Kubuntu is really slow and took several hours. I think that's probably because I only provisioned 512 MB of RAM and a single CPU. One of the tricky parts during the install was to configure the partition table. The auto layout option provided by Solaris did not work. The default had the root file system (/), /usr and swap checked. When I left the default alone and tried the auto-layout option, I got an error message. I tried to manually partition it, but it's not that straight-forward because Solaris has some idiosyncrasies in how the slices inside the partition table should be set up. So I returned to the auto-layout option, but this time, selecting several more mount points, e.g. /opt/ export/home, etc. and the auto-layout worked. The installation was able to complete without any further problems.

I ran the system for a while but it crashed after a few abrupt power downs in the VM. So now, the boot archive is corrupt, and I stupidly chose the fail-safe mode and copied over the boot archive in the fail safe mode as well. As it stands now, the Solaris VM is officially kaput.

I need to figure out a way to rebuild the boot achieve. Save it for another day. Sigh...

Oh, incidentally, I also tried to install Fedora 9 on the VMWare Server in Kubuntu. Although the install completed successfully, the boot returned a fatal error, which appeared to be a bug in Fedora. I searched on the Internet and could not find anyone who's done an install of Fedora 9 in a Kubuntu VM. So for now, I think Fedora 9 just does not work in this set up.