[Techtalk] Prodigal daughter and dual boot woes

[Daniel Pittman]

Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> writes:
> Amanda Haynes writes:
>> I still have failed to successfully dual boot Kubuntu 8.1 and Vista.  After
>> more forum surfing I have come to the conclusion that my shiny Dell with
>> "hardware" RAID 1 is the issue.  
>
> This is all secondhand information since I don't have hardware RAID,
> but I've been told that the Ubuntu (and I assume Kubuntu) Live CDs
> don't handle RAID, but the "alternate installer" discs do. So you
> might be able to keep your hardware RAID and still use Kubuntu.

The Ubuntu community documentation supports that; 8.10 has dmraid
support in the alternate installer, but not the graphical one:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto [1]

Which chipset / RAID controller is that, though?  Some of the newer
chipsets are not so well supported by dmraid.


Alternately, this documents doing things the hard way:
http://bbossola.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/dmraid-on-ubuntu-with-sata-fakeraid/


>> Thoughts?  Ideas on how to automate my backups?  I'm sure there's
>> some software out there that will do it for me :) Good virtualization
>> software?
>
> I don't do virtualization (my machines are too wimpy :-) but my
> husband has been experimenting with it a lot and he likes virtualbox
> best, though vmware also works very well.

In my experience VMWare Server 2 is a painful experience: it adds a Java
stack, TomCat, a Firefox extension and a whole lot of other fairly
extraneous and unreliable bibs and bobs. :/

On modern hardware your best bet, I suggest, is to use the KVM support
coupled with virt-manager and friends.  That is the upstream preferred
virtualization option, and works reasonably in my experience.

The one drawback is that it doesn't come with paravirtualized drivers
for proprietary operating systems[2], so performance may be lower than
using something more commercial.

[...]

> (I should mention he's only tried virtualizing Win XP, not Vista,
> so I don't know if there are any extra issues there.)

Generally speaking, no.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  Down when I checked a minute ago, so here is a Google cache link:
     http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:WdZWK09F2VcJ:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto+ubuntu+dmraid&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=opera

[2]  Well, except for a network driver that, in my experience, is not
     reliable or robust.