Does SuSE 10.2 or 10.1 dual boot with Vista Business? I have a Lenovo laptop with Vista on it because I have to get ahead of the curve and get the certification. What it does and doesn't do is a whole other story.

I've dual booted with XP before and I have Mandriva 2007 on my older desktop right now.

Since Novell and Microsoft have this agreement that has caused so much controversy, you would think that they could dual boot with each other's operating systems.

It would be interesting to see which one is faster. I would place the bet on Linux even though SuSE is in the middle range when it comes to speed.

If so, how was it done?

My strong advice would be to use a separate drive. In fact, at a recent event I attended, Nick McGrath (who had come to try and convert us Open Source users) advised against having Vista on the same drive as even another Windows OS let alone something else. However, if you do dual boot, ensure you install Linux after Vista, so that it gets to install grub after Vista has done its thing.
As to whether grub can boot Vista like it does other Windows, I think you are probably among those blazing the trail for us! Do let me know how you get on though.

My bet would also be on Linux, with the amount of extra cycles walling you in with TPM, and the extra gloss, Vista will be the slower of the two. If you have Aero turned on, you might want to enable XGL/AIGLX with Beryl or Compiz on Linux for a fair speed comparison.

Danny

I've tried 2 different live CDs on it so far. One of them could get online, the other could not. Vista has a totally new bootloader, not boot.ini. With a laptop, you only have one hard drive so adding another is not an option.




Currently on my older desktop, I have a SATA 2 hard drive that dual boots with XP and Mepis 6.5. Before I upgraded to the SATA 2 I ran SuSE 10 from the original IDE drive. Later versions of SuSE couldn't get online, earlier ones couldn't see the SATA 2 drive.



The good news is that I have 1 live CDs that will work. Even in an emergency, I can save my data or go online without touching my hard drive.

why use 2 different drives for dual boot? It won't make any diffence weather its XP or vista because suse uses grub to take the mbr anyway.

And in general performance it makes no difference either. Why would you think its a problem having them on the same hard disk?

I have a WD 80GB drive and have now Vista Business and SuSE 10.3A1 on it. Works fine. Linux is much faster than Vista.

Exactly how did you do it? Did you put the boot loader on the root of the drive or make a master boot record? Was it necessary to use any third party software or edit GRUB? If so, would this work with any type of Unix like Solaris or Mepis 6.5 or just SuSE 10.2?

How stable is 10.3? What is it like?

I just let SuSE do it automatically. But you can decide what should be the size of the partition by yourself, during the installation.

My approach to multiple boots has been to use a very little boot manager that resides 100% in the MBR. This approach is very safe. I has worked very well with all versions of windows (I have not tried Vista). MS approach is to have a huge partition (100mb) for the nt loader. The MBR table just direct the flow to the hidden partition. Grub on the other hand has two stages and if you place it in the MBR that where part will be.
I use airboot. It has many features and it is very reliable. It resides in the MBR. It recognized all the partition. So my approach is the following:
1. load air boot in the MBR
2. Just configure (all with F1 help) and load Vista
3. Install linux
4. Be sure grub install in the booting partition and not in the MBR. For example if you only have </> a root partition for the whole linux there is where you place grub. If you have a /boot then there is where you place grub.
5. After success you can change the grub time to 0 and you will not see it again

Get version 105

http://ftp-os2.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/h-br...s2/util/system

-=terry(Denver)=-

I thought it important enough to jump in because I've read a bit about Vista/Linux dual-boot and do that myself.

Do not resize the Vista partition as was normally done during Linux installations during the setup! There's different stuff there now and Vista will no longer be usable if you allow the Linux install to resize that partition.

Windows Vista's Disk Management tool can now resize partitions. If you want to install Linux on the same hard drive as Vista and you need to provide more space for it, use the Vista Disk Management Tool or a 3rd party tool that has been designed for Windows Vista.

If you go with a 2nd hard drive for Linux you shouldn't have a problem. That's what I did. Just check the Windows section of the Boot Loader options during the Linux installation. On OpenSuSE 10.2 I needed to add the Chainloader +1 thing to it.

There are some detailed guides to Vista/Linux dual-boot setups on various websites. Search around and print out your favorites. That helped me out.

Something new on OpenSuSE 10.2 now. When doing the Online Update at the end of setup, one of those is a Kernel update. Either uncheck that or when the readme for it pops up suggesting that you wait until after a new installation to apply it in order to avoid hardware detection problems just press cancel. After SuSE has booted up to the desktop you can use the updater to fetch the Kernel Update.

Go into YaST and write down the boot loader settings so you can fix things up after the Kernel update, which does some weird things there.

Then, after it is applied and you restart, you should check out the boot configuration in YaST. You can rename the new Kernel section back to OpenSUSE 10.2 and move it back up to the top. Then use what you've written down from before to recreate the Failsafe bootup section. Make sure you use the tool to browse to the location of the new Kernel, duplicating what is in the main OpenSUSE 10.2 as far as how the Kernel file is now included in the path instead of just pointing to the boot folder. You can just browse to it and click right on the same file that the main boot section points to.

Then check the Windows section and make sure it still includes the Chainloader +1 stuff.

DO NOT select to suggest a new boot configuration. That erases all the needed information from all the sections and then YaST will not save the information if you try to manually edit in the correct lines. Something is broken in that area in the new Kernel. If you use it (having YaST suggest a new config) your system will no longer boot to anything unless you have the skill to manually edit the grub menu.lst file yourself and know all the correct lines to put in.

All was fine when I did the above suggestions with my new setup.

The new Kernel does include some nice fixes, one of which is proper USB gamepad automatic detection, and some of them are security fixes. So it's up to you but I chose to install it and just worked around the few bugs as mentioned above.

When it wrecked my working system when I didn't know about the boot configuration bugs I was angry that this was pushed by an important security update. However, once knowing how to work around the boot loader bug as I suggested above I think it is important to get the fixes.

Oh, one more thing. If you update your ATI/NVidia driver don't choose to test the configuration when finishing the SAX2 monitor setup. Just choose save and restart the computer. The test crashed SAX2 for me when done after the new Kernel was in place. That test always worked fine with the original Kernel so I guess SAX2 will need a bit of updating as well.

When I got Vista, I decided to format my 80GB WD HD. I had Vindows XP and SUSE 10.2 installed there before. So i formatted HD, installed Vista from DVD, checked if it works and then went on with SuSE 10.2 installation. All went well. No problems with updating , the only problem i had was the ATI drivers, which I decided not to install. I am not a game player so i do not need them. Some weeks ago I installed SUSE 10.3A1 and today I am going to upgrade(install) 10.3A2.

I spoke too soon about the USB gamepads working. Without my changing anything from the time they were detected correctly and when they once again aren't working.

Sheesh! The only way a game picks them up is if I login as root and do modprobe joydev. If I do that on my normal login the KDE Personal Settings picks them up but not any games. Running SuSEconfig afterwards has no effect.

As I'm just a beginner to Linux (a few weeks now) gameplay on it is just something I'm beginning to try out. I was pleased to see that Dosbox 0.70 installed right from YaST (I think either Packman or KDE3 repos had it) works great!

That SuperTux game is really nice, but not with the keyboard. I can play Solitaire on the keyboard but I'm too used to a gamepad to play arcade games with it. As I don't like logging on as root I'll just have to do without it until that USB gamepad issue bug is dealt with.

Not sure there's anything I can personally do about it. Nobody has responded yet on the SuSE forum I posted the problem too. Many times when no one has a fix there isn't a reply.

I like using Compiz once in a while. The only way to do that with ATI is to use the fglrx driver. Stangely, even though I have full 3D support SuperTux says OpenGL not available. Hmm, all the OpenGL Screensavers work, fgl_glxgears works, fglrxinfo reports the ATI card in 3D mode, the KDE My Computer says 3D Support enabled. So I don't know why that game doesn't think I have it.

So while things aren't quite perfect yet I'm still enjoying the experience.

Sure hope OpenSuse 10.3 winds up fixing the gamepad problem. That, and the hp opensource driver folks are working on the deskjet 4160 problem of needing to turn it off and on between jobs for it to print. And the way it really only uses the color cartridge even though I have both a color and black inkjet cartridge in there! I think they probably need to make a specific 4160 PPD file. Right now there is only a 4100 Series foomatic PPD. Maybe the 4100 only has one cartridge spot?

Anyway, to talk about the dual-boot, yes the most trouble free way is with seperate hard drives for Vista and Linux. Vista just made some funky changes that make it even problematic to have XP there on the same drive. When I used the Microsoft dual-boot method I didn't appreciate the way XP always deleted all the Vista System Restore points anytime it started up! This didn't happen the last time because I made all the partitions primary and hid them from each other. But that got me into trouble with the new Suse Kernel update. I could only access the data on the drives with Linux. No Windows (or dos boot disk) could even access the drives! Of course, that's all gone now. Just Vista on one and SuSE on the other now.