> That's the real problem with Windows. I need a double boot, place > the OS on a FAT32 partition and have a copy of every file + an > image of the installed partition. Every day I fight against the > operating system I have paid for and if the OS doesn't let me > change it the nice way I have to do it the hard way. If I was > starting now, I would be a Linux user.
There's another way, and it's not too bad, depending upon how often you want to switch operating systems. Get a second drive. I have been burnt by windows more times than I care to have been (twice), so I decided to do the safest thing possible -- I don't even cross the streams. I just separate the OSes onto physically distinct drives, and in my case on different controller types, which makes it super-easy to switch between them. Yes, you can modify the boot loader on the main (windows) drive so that it recognizes the second drive, but I do something even less error-prone -- I just swap which drive is considered the boot drive in my BIOS at boot time. This takes about 2 seconds and does the obvious thing that I want -- if I'm spending weeks in FreeBSD, I don't have to do a thing until for some crazy reason I want to switch back to windows (usually to play a game of some kind, or to use some esoteric feature of my peripherals that nobody has bothered to reverse-engineer yet). Most windows-esque tasks are handleable in a modern unix system: abiword and openoffice do a reasonable job at emulating word and office, respectively (and openoffice is about as bloated a chunk of code as you might expect as a result) can read and save files from/into the relevant formats, and have about the same ease/unease of use. Gimp is a reasonable clone of photoshop, although if you're a serious designer you already have a mac and over $1200 worth of adobe software and are doing it the right way. There isn't, and this is actually a fortunate thing, yet any way to use unix without at some point needing to use a command-line tool. This is what will keep it out of the hands of consumers for a long time to come, but I think that it's an inherent fact of a secure operating system. Anything that runs in the same way that vmware runs is pretty cool, although I'm not aware of anything mature and free that does the same thing as well as it does (i'm sure that someone will correct me on this point.) If the company you work for will pay for it, just tell them that you need a copy to get work done. As of a few years ago, it was working really well (vmware, that is -- the tactic is timeless). The reason that NetBSD is so good is for a similar reason to the reason that you like Windows95. It is tiny. Extremely tiny. Moreso, it will run on just about any hardware that you can still get to power up. Unfortunately, it comes with just enough tools to *compile* everything that you need to use it. So it's a fantastic way to learn about unix, but not practical for people who want something that has, say, a beautiful looking window system with knobs to control everything about their operating system right out of the box (not having these things is a good thing in my mind, though). The reason that it isn't practical for most people is because you're going to need to compile that window system, and there will be a large and painfully recursive tree of dependencies that will need to be compiled first. If you enjoy this kind of one-time masochism in the pursuit of knowledge, then it's well worth your time. Linux is starting to be a good compromise for most folks, and ubuntu is pretty popular these days, but I still think that FreeBSD has the best compromise between features and kernel sanity for someone moderately comfortable with unix. I've seem windows users semi-easily switch to ubuntu without regret or too much of a learning curve, but they will eventually find something that doesn't work and/or is extremely difficult to do without using windows. It's just an issue of compromise -- people are so used to rebooting their broken operating systems that they've forgotten that it's not something that you're supposed to have to do! Unix boxes can brag about 10+ year uptimes, for crying out loud. s. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
