Dual Boot with Ubuntu and Windows
My experiment with dual booting to either Ubuntu or Windows XP on an old PC is working well. The computer in question has an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor with 256Mb of RAM, so it’s far from state of the art. I had two logical drives on a 40Gb physical drive. Windows was on the C drive and so I used the D drive for the Ubuntu installation. The only problem came when Ubuntu was wanting a location for a swap file and I needed to create a small partition on the D drive for this swap file with the main Ubuntu installation taking up the rest of the D drive. On booting, the two operating system options are presented and the preferred choice can be made.
After installing Ubuntu, there are 197 recommended updates, about 250Mb in total, and I chose all of them. Now things are working fine. I’ve installed a simple firewall called Lokkit and instructions on how to set this up can be found here. As for antivirus and antispyware, I’ll quote from an Ubuntu forum:
Q: Are viruses, trojans and malware a threat to a Linux system as in Windows?
A: No, there’s very few viruses that attack Linux and the way a Linux/unix is build up makes it difficult to do any serious damage to the system, in fact I’ve never heard from people who got their Linux/unix system infected.
Q: So why install a anti-virus application/program?
A: For an ordinary Linux Home user with only one operating system, there’s no need for Anti-virus but people who are running a network, server or dual booting with Windows OS, this tool can be very handy to scan and delete viruses.
Q: I’m a home user only running Linux do I need it?
A: No, a firewall is way better as protection in that case.
So that’s about it for the moment. Let’s see how it all turns out.
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