# I can haz dual-boot? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 28, 2008, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020 "2008-03-28T05:05:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Captain\_Carrot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Captain\_Carrot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Carrot)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020/1 "2008-03-28T05:05:51Z")
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Tonight, I partitioned my hard drive and installed Ubuntu on the second one. Currently I have Firefox and a terminal open, and I’ve got a bunch of new piddly little games to try. (I downloaded WINE, but it isn’t working terribly well. I couldn’t make Gchat work.) I thought it’d take a lot longer than this for me to have Linux on my own computer. My HS CS teachers will be so proud… ---
**Author:** ![Crown\_Prince\_of\_Irony](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Crown\_Prince\_of\_Irony](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crown_Prince_of_Irony)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020/2 "2008-03-28T05:14:05Z")
Sweet. I’ve always wanted to play around with dual-boot, but never had the nerve. It’s not like I’ve got computers just lying around the house. . . no, wait, actually I do. I’m just too chicken to dive into the Linux end of the pool. I have nothing else to say, except that you **can haz** a red-hot poker up the _oh-noes!_ for invoking that evil, evil phrase. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Ice\_Wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/dfb087/32.png) [@Ice\_Wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ice_Wolf)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 8:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020/3 "2008-03-28T08:05:45Z")
Now we just need a LOL cat pic to go with that title … ---
**Author:** ![Buckler\_of\_Swashing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Buckler\_of\_Swashing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buckler_of_Swashing)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020/4 "2008-03-28T08:16:11Z")
[QUOTE=Ice Wolf] Now we just need a LOL cat pic to go with that title … [/QUOTE] [This one!](http://www.tucowsblog.com/images/2006/10/computer-cat.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Ice\_Wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/dfb087/32.png) [@Ice\_Wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ice_Wolf)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 8:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020/5 "2008-03-28T08:21:34Z")
Purr-fect! ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Carrot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Captain\_Carrot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Carrot)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-haz-dual-boot/443020/6 "2008-03-28T18:42:44Z")
Heh. Just did my CS homework, which I have to submit as a PDF for some reason; in XP, I either had to use the extremely cumbersome OneNote and then export that to PDF, or use Word and print to PDF using PrimoPDF, a third-party extension. In Ubuntu, I wrote it in OpenOffice, which was as easy as doing it in Word, and then simply exported it to PDF. Linux is awesome. (Although I have this weird issue with Ubuntu thinking that the scroll area on my touchpad is about twice as wide as it actually is, so when I try to move the pointer with my finger too close to the right edge of the pad, it scrolls instead. Weird.) By the way, the dual-boot process itself wasn’t particularly difficult, just time-consuming. You need to have a copy of some distro on a CD, and I’m pretty sure you also need a partition-manager on another CD, and you have to reboot a few times. The big thing is just shrinking your XP partition, which for me took two hours for some reason, but once that was done everything else just flew by. Once I have my own computer not required to be able to run any specific applications (although if I’m a high school teacher, that may never happen), I think I may have Linux on the main drive and XP on an external, since I’m pretty sure I can’t rely on Wine (or VMware) to cover every program I might have to use.