Dual Boot
There are two main ways to do this: dual-booting, and running a virtual machine.
Work in progress
This page was automatically migrated from the legacy Taggi site ( https://taggi.cse.unsw.edu.au/FAQ/Dual_Boot/) and is pending review. Content, links and screenshots may be incomplete or incorrect.
Dual-booting is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it.
- Managing partitions and boot loaders can be difficult and time-consuming unless you have a lot of experience with it.
- It's easy to break the boot environnment, losing access to one or even both of your operating systems.
- Recovering from a broken boot environment can be extremely difficult, and it's possible to break things even more.
- Sharing files between the two operating systems can be problematic, and one OS can quite easily damage another one's system files.
- Removing an unwanted dual-boot OS can be difficult, and often the disk space can only be reclaimed as a separate drive letter under windows.
If you really have to dual-boot
- Boot Camp for Mac lets you install Windows in a separate partition.
- Most Linux distribtions can set up dual-boot for you - see the (Ubuntu Help page)
- You can also Install Ubuntu in a Windows partition and boot to that.
Virtual Machines
VMware
Full-featured commercial product.
CSE has VMWare licenses available for staff and enrolled students - contact [System Support](<mailto:ss@cse.unsw.edu.au?subject=VMWare License Request>) to request a license.
Oracle Virtualbox
Slightly smaller feature set, but more than enough for most cases, and completely free to use.
Download from virtualbox.org.
Alternative approaches
CSE VLAB
CSE provide a virtualised CSE lab environment
CSE Login servers
CSE provide a number of Linux login servers, for remote access.
Windows Subsystem for Linux
The WSL lets you install a stripped-down Linux distribution directly into Windows 10