I always thought dual booting was a very complicated thing: partitions, swaps, etc. But I was just installing Xubuntu 15.04 on a Windows computer and it gave me the option to install my Xubuntu next to the Windows. That's dual booting then, right?

And is that cool to do or should I choose the custom choice (I clicked on it to check it out and it looked mega complicated)?

In my experienced in installing dual boot i install windows first..then i extended my partition in windows lets say Drive C: D: E: F: G

and you install your windows in drive C:...THEN ALL DISTRO in D: (REDHAT), E: (FEDORA) F: (DEBIAN) etc..etc... :-)

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Hi

Well, it may well be that simple.

If your PC has available partitions then it should just work. If it does not work, you may have to manually adjust the partitions(using the custom choice). It depends on how your PC is set up. The issue is that some windows/manufacturer's installations use up all 4 available primary partitions. Linux usually needs 2 partitions, so you have to free up primary partitions, or more usually, create an extended partition giving you more available. I'm not going to write a book on it here - there is plenty of info on this subject. If you do use the "custom choice", do read up on it first. You can really mess up !!

I suggest that before doing anything with partitions (including trying the automatic install) you back up everything you value in your windows installation and make sure you have a set of recovery media for windows. (A windows recovery partition on the PC is not much use if its really messed up).

In many cases it does work really well - the ubuntu installer is one of the better ones.

Roger

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as par as my knowledge is concern the GRUB is controlling your OS in booting.
so you can try all linux DISTRO's not only UBUNTU.. :-)

As long as the GRUB version and configuration are the same you can install all of them.

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I dual-booted Xubuntu with Windows 7 a couple of months ago - to make it "cleaner" I put a new drive in to host Linux, leaving the Windows drives as they were and this seems to give me a very usable and risk-free dual boot. It also means that I can disconnect any of my Windows drives and move them to another machine if I want to (or simply trash them and provide an extra 2TB for Linux!).

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It doesn't have to be complicated if you have a drive with enough space on it, etc. If you've got peculiar requirements, like this bit of this OS must go on an SSD, while the other bit goes on a conventional hard drive, or you don't really have enough space, it can get a bit more messy, but it doesn't have to.

I'm not sure about Xubuntu, but the custom choice is probably for someone who wants/needs the flexibility to place partitions exactly where they want them and nowhere else. If you can just ignore that, at least for now, you'll probably be happier. It isn't really that difficult, but you want to be clear headed when you do it, and, if not, just take longer 'till you are sure it is right.

The only thing that I would suggest is when the time to upgrade comes around, you want to take a careful look at your partition layout and be sure that the installer is doing the right thing (ie, it hasn't got confused and decided to recruit one of your Windows partitions for your install of 15.10, or whatever. And backup, of course.)

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If you want to be simple and safe then install a free virtual machine and run almost any number of OS's from within windows. Almost all but not all modern windows computers can run a vm easily. There is almost no chance you can bork your current OS this way. Almost 100% chance everything will work.

You also have ways to run linux from a usb flash or hard drive.

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Yes

This is one thing (x)ubuntu really does well. For someone unfamiliar with the technical details, the automatic option should work fine. That is what I did with xubuntu 14.04 with no problems. What Windows version do you have?

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Thanks everyone for the great advice. I just recently booted some old computers to Mint. Now if I choose an additional distro can I add that distro to Mint as a dual boot? (In other words, do all the distros you install give the dual-booting option?)

Hey jross. It was XP.

If asked to install install next to windows, it is a true dualboot.
It will usually show a picture of the windows partition, which you can grab on it to resize partition, I prefer to create my own unallocated space & select it, because then I'm not depending on the installer to warn me if I'm trying to resize too much.

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Thanks EDDY

You're welcome.
Good Luck

You can have as many operating systems installed as you want. Only one can run at a time. A bootloader e.g. grub will display a menu at startup, and you can choose what os to boot. It is always recommended to have a dedicated partition for every installed os. That's really all there's to it. Windows installer doesn't play nice with other operating systems, so it will wipe any installed bootloader and install its own. If you install Linux first and Windows later, you'll have to install the bootloader by hand again.

Thanks. Don't think I'll be adding Linux to Windows, but I suppose it's possible.