On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 09:31:09AM -0600, n4lbl wrote: > > My middle ground is really one foot on each side of the chasm!
Many people find a dual-boot installation to be either a comforting transition method or their preferred setup. My brother has been using it that way for many years now: Linux for surfing, email, security, networking (e.g., I helped him set up a media router, so the entire family can have access to all the music and videos in the house collection from any room) and so on, and Windows for the couple of proprietary applications that he wants or needs to run. I see that as an excellent solution for people in his situation. > The clumsiness is that I can't have Vista & Ubuntu at he same time.═ If I > really had to have both at once there are virtual machine solutions that I > didn't want to learn.═ They also work well but I just didn't want to jump thru > those hoops. You really, really should try VMWare. Trust me: there are *no* hoops to jump through; it's actually fun. Open the VMWare player, double-click the OS image you want to run, and it's up and running! You can even copy things from one OS into another, or into the host environment. Many Windows programmers that I've spoken to now run Linux with VMWare: that way, when Windows crashes, they can "reboot it" (restart the image) in 3-4 seconds. For myself, I don't hate Microsoft and I don't spend time railing against them (although I've been known to crack a joke or two at their expense) - whatever people choose to use for their OS is up to them, and does not put money in my pocket or take it out. The classes I teach are directed at high-end professionals, people who work in multi-million or multi-billion dollar industries or rely on computers for vital and mission-critical tasks and thus _have_ to use professional-level, secure, efficient operating systems like Linux. Windows is simply a non-entity in that world, a substandard legacy OS used by non-professionals. I don't use Windows for philosophical, financial, and technical reasons - not necessarily in that order - and I contribute my time to supporting something I believe in. I run a magazine for the Linux community (4.5 million hits per month, by the way; we've been around a while), help people with technical questions, develop software and teach others to do so, and so on. I like to think of it as paying back for something I use, and paying forward so that there's more of it _to_ use - for myself and others. People who help, in whatever manner, are welcome; people who participate cheerfully and are pleasant to be around are also (as anywhere). Whiners and screamers? They don't have any leverage - since they pay nothing and contribute nothing - and they have no value, since all they bring with them is their lack of manners. The most they ever get, from those of us who are willing to go that far, is one warning - an opportunity to correct their behavior. If they ignore it, /dev/null (the bottomless trash pit) is always waiting. -- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET * _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
