|
|
||
Multi-Booting Thoughts—Day 9© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I’ve been multi-booting for a couple of years. Multi-booting can be a nuisance—especially when on dial-up. I need to stay in my NT4 system to remain productive but I need to remain in my GNU/Linux system to migrate. Additionally, dependably sharing files requires a FAT32 partition. Natively, NT4 does not support FAT32 although there is a freely available driver I use. Yet that solution hits a brick wall because there are no NT4 tools to repair FAT32 partitions. That means maintaining a Windows 98 boot disk with Scandisk. This is a cumbersome process. I seldom shuffle files, but that will change as I migrate. Nonetheless, because FAT32 is the only file system easily used between Windows and GNU/Linux, some time ago I formatted all of my backup hard drives with FAT32 because I anticipated doing backups in both environments. However, I wonder, do the GNU/Linux file checking tools support repairing FAT32 partitions should that need arise? I would love to automate FAT32 file system checking and repair at each boot along with my ext3 file partitions! An alternative to multi-booting is virtual management, such as is offered through VMWare. However, I do not possess the hardware muscle necessary for running virtual operating systems, nor do I care for the steep price of the software and additional hardware I would need. Newer hardware also likely means not having a silent computer. However, several months ago I received a gift—a discarded ASUS P2B PII Celeron computer with an AGP video card, 256 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive. A rocket! I have been running Mandrake 9.2 with KDE 3.1.3 on my current K6-III+ box. I suspect I will see a slightly faster response with the PII box because of the faster front side bus and AGP video. Thus, I could use that box as a test bed for GNU/Linux while maintaining a clean GNU/Linux environment on my multi-boot system. Possibly too I could network the two boxes. In some cases sharing files through a network is easier than through a multi-boot FAT32 process. One advantage of using two computers versus multi-boot is I can run the test box concurrently with my primary box. I need not reboot and lose time while I educate myself. I also can more easily teach myself with both computers running concurrently and side-by-side. Still, ultimately I do not want to maintain two boxes. Although I have the office space to run two systems, I don’t want my office converted into a “mad scientist” laboratory. I spend a lot of time at my desk and I want to maintain my comfortable atmosphere. An additional drawback to the second computer is a higher electric energy bill. I want the test box to be temporary. I have experimented with using GNU/Linux for web surfing, but having a firewall is important to me. I have used Kerio Personal Firewall for several years (formally Tiny Personal Firewall). IPTables currently is beyond my immediate understanding and is a project for another day. I understand the Kerio firewall rule system and I hope there exists a similar interface in GNU/Linux. I know that as-is the IPTables configuration is solid protection and I probably need not tinker much with that if I can find a good script. I do not need or plan to use any server services. My challenge will be to find a friendly front-end tool to help me configure IPTables! Backups are a challenge for me. If I network two computers I can expand my Windows backup batch files to include important files from my GNU/Linux computer. That solution provides me data integrity while I learn and test the bash scripting language. There will be no pressure of potentially losing data and configuration files. However, if I continue multi-booting, then I need to convert my backup scripts to bash because there is no easy way to read ext3 partitions from Windows. I can easily backup both operating systems from GNU/Linux. Of course, I could maintain two sets of backup scripts, one for each environment. An early transitional option is to use the Konqueror file manager to manually copy and paste to backup important GNU/Linux files (/home, /etc, /root, /usr/local), at least initially until I learn to write some rudimentary bash scripts! Finis. |
||