What is dual-boot, exactly?

[Platyply]

Hi. I know how newbie this sounds, but I wanted to know if dual-boot literally is the booting of two OSs at the same time or the user choosing which OS to boot to run the system. I am asking this b\c I was interested in doing a Linux 7/ Win98SE dual boot for a 1Ghz Pentium III w/384MB of RAM. Will 20GB be enough to have two operating systems, plus you normal run of the mill software? What is the best program to manage multiple Operating Systems. How can Win2K be so great if most games aren't written for it?

 

[Wuming]

dual boot means you can choose to boot between two different OSes. 20 gb is much more than enough! not sure if a program exists that manages multiple OSes though.

 

[IamDavid]

Dual Boot or Multi-Boot allows you to choose from many different OS's at startup. I have a 4 OS boot system and I use all 4 OS's regularly. A 20GB hard drive is plenty. I use 10GB for all 4 OS's combined, then another 15GB partition for my Programs,Games.
You don't need any special software to manage a multi boot system. If your using Linux\Win98SE than you will be able to use a program called LILO to choose between OS's. Lilo is included with Linux.
As for Win2K being god for gaming. I think its excellent. I've had no problems with any of my games and have seen a performance increase in alot of them..

 

[jbird]

dual post. sorry

 

[jbird]

As a newbie with a dual boot Win98 and Linux Mandrake 6.0, I found it less of a hassle to boot Linux from a boot disk, rather than LILO. LILO would work fine for a while and then things would go haywire.

 

[bex0rs]

Dual / Multi boot is a pain in the ass. If you can afford it, just build multiple computers and have ONE OS on each computer. Keep it simple, and you'll also learn about about heterogeneous environments / networking.

 

[tjll11a]

i agree, have more then one computer

 

[dapic]

If you really want to run multiple OSs at the same time on one machine, you could try VMware (vmware.com). It's pretty expensive tho ($300), but cheaper than building multiple machines.

But I couldn't manage to install BeOS in VMware.

 

[ArkAoss]

ok well i've also got a 4 0s system running, and with microsoft os's it was pretty easy, just partitioned a 20gb drive into like 10 parts, or one for each os, and a few for data; using partition magic, and another bootable hard drive.
As far as a program to manage the os's, do you mean a bootloader/boot menu? i have only expierience with windows 2k's boot loader. but other people here might know more.