My name is Mel Roth and this is My 1st post.I don't post much but I was wondering if anybody in the know would know how hard it would be to dual boot win8 with any distro linux when 8 is released for download friday?I triple boot now with win7 with Ubuntu10.04 and slackware 14.I wasn't going to mess with win8 as I very seldom use windows except for running programs that are windows only,but for 40 bucks I would like to try it.If anyone could point Me in the right direction to find the information I would appreciate it.Thanks for your time.

I'm a little confused about it myself, but here's what I've gathered so far: if secure boot is in your BIOS, you will never be able to boot into anything but Linux unless you turn it off (assuming you can); Windows seems to have changed the boot sequence, it is now much much faster, and you no longer have a screen that says press such and such to see the boot menu, you just have to keep slamming the key and hope it's the right one; my friend had an early release for students copy and we could not get GRUB to pick up on the Linux installation, something weird with EFI, at any rate, we could not get it to work even after about 5 hours of work, but this may be due to his shitty locked down Asus mobo.

In short, in my experience it is fairly difficult, but this is before most of the Linux community gets their hands on it, so it may be that people will devise ways to make it easy once again. My honest suggestion would be to run it in KVM unless you truly need top notch performance.

If you just want to look at Windows 8 then I would suggest you to use a virtual machine. No one knows a lot about windows 8 and it is possible that you may end up with an unootable pc.
Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the replys.I may just download and hold off installing Win8 for a while.I cannot imagine using a computer with only windows on it.I'm not real good at using windows as I think Linux is easier.I also think that Win7 will be usable for another 5 years or so.I am also thinking that slackware might work as I boot it with a floppy instead of installing lilo to the mbr.

for what it is worth

wait until the major tech publishers like O'Reilly
publish a manual on dual booting with win8

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