hi all,

well i made the jump to linux in an effort to get away from windows completely, but after months of efforts to coax my wife to agree to a linux only solution... i've failed. she absolutely wants me to reinstall windows on our pc. anyhow, my question is... are there any precautions to take when having a dual boot win/lin machine. i left windows to get away from the thousand of viruses and security holes and blah blah. if i have both oses installed and windows gets infected by some sort of virus or whatever... is my linux partition still safe???? i'm guessing no, but is there anything to do to alleviate the concern. other then the usual antivirus/firewall software/hardware.

funny story... guess what finaly put my wife over the top on wanting to put windows back on. the other day she was working from home and she got a call for her tech at work. he said he hated the browser she was using (firefox) cause he was getting a slew of errors from it. he then proceeded to tell her she should get me to install windows and have a real browser like ie to work from LOL.

thanks,
drisay.

Make sure you install windows first for your dual boot system and no, a windows virus or worm will do nothing to a linux partition,

Hey, at least she TRIED it! I'm still trying to get my wife to use FIREFOX on her XP laptop... sigh...

There's a bunch of threads here regarding your question, but bottom line is that your Windows system shouldn't even be aware of the existence of your Linux system (I don't THINK XP can even view ext2/ext3 filesystems, unlike Linux, which has no problems with NTFS and FAT32 systems) If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me

yeah, she tried. she herself has no problems with firefox... so i was happy about that... but it's just the idea of not having the same os at work and at home she doesn't appear to like. she doesn't like entering a password and blah blah blah... i guess she just doesn't like change.

anyways, she has her right to an opinion and i have no choice but to accept it... i guess lol

thanks for the replies.

"Doesn´t like passwd..."

Set kde/gnome to log on automatically.


"Virus, worms..."

They are windows programs, remember.


"Win won´t see ext2, ext3..."

There´s this Explore2fs, if I recall correctly, which can make win see an ext2 partition. But the modern reiserfs, xfs, ext3, etc... won´t do no good at a win computer.

"She doesn´t like change..."

Yeah, that´s very common. The issue to be made clear is that linux provide real and concrete advantages over win. Not only the philosophical ones.