Now Booting – Vista, XP, Ubuntu

You know that new machine I built? The one with loaded with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz | ASUS P5B Deluxe, G.SKILL 4GB DDR2 800, EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB, 2 x HITACHI Deskstar 320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s harddrives, and a recently acquired 160Gb SATA 1.5Gb/s harddrive.

Originally I used one of my Hitachi drivers for Vista x64 and the second drive was for storage. I had Battlefield 2142 working on Vista, but it didn’t exactly “work well”. Over mother’s day weekend, I drove to Best Buy and scored the smallest SATA drive I could find. The plan was to load XP on it so I could have that as my BF2142 gaming environment. After some screaming and yelling I got XP to load (I had issues with the JMicron RAID controller).

Yesterday, I wanted to see if I could get Ubuntu running on my system as well. Sure enough, Ubuntu is installed on the 160Gb drive. Using GRUB, I just choose if I want XP or Ubuntu. I am still having issues with installing the Nvidia drivers for Linux. I can get everything to work, but when I reboot the machine, X-Server fails to load. To fix it, I just stop the GDM service, reload the installer, restart GDM, and then…. boom – I’m back in Ubuntu with all the desktop eye-candy working. This isn’t something I want to keep doing in order to use Linux. Looks like I will be doing a lot of reading in the Ubuntu forums.

Here’s the break down:

• HD1 – Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Boot off this drive and you get to drool over my Jessica Biel wallpaper. I just love her eyes….
• HD2, partition A – Windows XP Pro 32-bit. This is the Battlefield environment.
• HD2, partition B – Ubuntu 7.04 32-bit. This is my “learn how to use Linux” environment. Out of all the Linux distros, I love Ubuntu!

You’re probably asking why I did this? My response – why not? I just wanted to see if I could pull it off and so far I think I just about got it. :happy: