 Multi-Booting Windows 98, Linux, and SolarisTM
Brian Gollsneider
I really enjoyed Brian Wilson's article, "Using VMware
as a Development Tool," in Sys Admin (March 2001). Wilson
described using VMware to emulate a Windows machine running on top
of a Linux box but, rephrasing his theme, it is also a technique
for getting more out of your hardware. You might wonder why bother
-- hardware is so cheap that you can go out and get another
box for peanuts. As I write this, I find ads selling complete systems
for $800, 256 MB RAM for $80, and a 30-GB hard drive for $60. It's
true that hardware is dirt cheap, but I find that my most limiting
factor is not dollars but space. I run out of desk space before
I run out of dollars to buy machines. So, to get more out of my
hardware, I use the old Linux technique of multi-booting. Sometimes
you just need the native OS, or sometimes the hardware you're
working with is too underpowered to handle the overhead that an
emulator/virtual machine adds. In this article, I present a formula
to quickly set a machine to boot Windows 98, Linux, and Intel Solaris
at no cost beyond the operating systems.
Multi-booting means that you can select which operating system
to run when the computer is booting up. You can access one OS at
a particular time, play computer games, and then reboot into a different
OS.
|
