Hi,
For those who want to try Linux before jumping in with both feet, the obvious way is to run Linux in a virtual machine.

You can get VirtualBox for Windblows and it just installs like any other Windblows app so any experienced windows user should have no problem.

Creating the virtual machine is again a question of just follow the wizard! You DO need to have a notion of what goes on under the covers but the wizard leads you by the hand.

The only caveat is that the machine you are installing on has enough resources ... most any modern machine does!

As an aside, I NEVER use dual-boot. If I want to run multiple OSes I always use virtual machines. So much easier.

cheers
pete

pete hilton
saruman@ruvolo-hilton.org

you win the day sir. couldn't have said it better myself. unless you are trying to game or other high intensity programs there is zero reason to dual boot.

Unless, of course, you bought a machine with Windows pre-installed -- then it is either difficult (converting a ream machine to virtual using only recovery media) or expensive (buying Windows again) to dual boot. I have also noticed that things like iTunes can be awkward (though luckily not unusable) in VMs as can some Silverlight video sites (when one might want to use Windows so as not to "pollute" the Linux system with Silverlight or just not want WINE causing problems[as it has for myself and other people]).
Of course the reason many people dual boot home computers is gaming...

+273
If you have Windows pre-installed (the usual case) you install virtualbox in Windows and run linux in one or more virtual machines. That is not much more difficult than running word, outlook, or some games. No need to do P2V on ANYTHING!

The only difficulty that would make dual boot preferable would be if your machine were so old and resource short that virtual would not perform. This is getting rare.

I have Win7 Pro 64-bit on one work laptop with 4G ram. I run virtualbox and have several Linux test cases in virtual machines. RAM is slightly stressed if I run more than one at a time, but the main limitation is CPU. My company buys commodity grade minimum bidder laptops, no extra power. (I scarfed memory from another laptop that died to get to 4G)
Since cheap new laptops are offered with 8G ram now, and some with twice the (faster and more efficient) cores, I suspect many new machines would do better than mine.

Well, yes, if you virtualise Linux you can do it easily but, then, everything has a layer of abstraction about it which can cause issues and anything like the above-mentioned games won't work on Linux. You also don't get direct disk access, which means you've to jump through hoops to get at any shared data as you would dual-booting anyhow but worse. I use a lot of VMs and used my other laptop with a Debian VM but, to me at least, as a day-to-day setup it's annoying. I do, also, find that VMs do run noticeably slower on these laptops which are fairly modern but fairly budget specification.

I tend to agree with @273
In a VM or similar - you don't get the full benefit compared to a native install directly onto the HW.

But good stuff and discussions from all above - I merely wish to put a focus on the possibility of making a dualboot 'easier' to non-linux future users to really try it out alongside their WIN install, and a real experience can best be achieved from a linux OS living directly on the HW.

I've dual booted but only between Linux distros, when I first started really using Linux it was in a virtual machine and honestly I felt that was sufficient except for very few things. Eventually after I learned how to use it I switched to running Windows in a virtual machine on Linux and today I don't have Windows at all on my computer.

I know a lot of people feel you don't get as good of an experience but there's advantages as well, and you really only lose a few things (such as games)

I do not lose games, I just run different games.

There are gazillions of games for Linux, and a far hiher percentage of them are free. The BEST games cost money, and about the same as a game for Windows or a console system, but you can enjoy burning DAYS on games that you can play for FREE!
Some of my best play is still on very well designed games that were written for DOS and Win3, running far better under DOSBOX on a linux machine than they ever did on native hardware back in 1986.

Other than that, I agree.
Back on subject, are we considering multiboot systems that involve Windows, or multiboot systems with multiple Linux and BSD installs as well?
Because if we talk about Windows, that pretty much identifies the source of the problem and who would have to cooperate in makeing it easy.