Just in time for the end of 2013 my laptop broke down. So now I finally had an excuse to put the plans that I already had for a few months into practice. The basic plan was to install Windows and Linux in parallel on the same machine and then do some fancy stuff with it. But this time "for real" and not with the help of a Windows installer. Because some people occasionally asked me about installing operating systems (OS) and partitioning hard drives now I wrote down what I did as a summary and a rough direction guide as this is usually what I am missing when I want to try something new.
First thing to do was reinstalling the Windows OS. For that I used the built-in recovery partition of my laptop. Although I knew that this would install a whole bunch of crap programmes that I would remove immediately afterwards I wanted to keep the nice power management tools that I would have lost if I had not used the factory setting recovery. Windows easy peasy done in half an hour. ;)
Next step was preparing the hard drive for the second Linux OS. For that I added three partitions with Partition Wizard: One for the actual OS (ext4 file system), one for data (ext4 file system) and one for exchanging files between Windows and Linux (FAT32 file system). Actually this separation of OS and data is not necessary, it is more a "good style" to do it. You should do it for your Windows system as well although I did not do it for my laptop as I tend to back up everything anyway. Nevertheless I should feel bad for this inconsistency and I do. There would have been just too many partitions ... I will probably use this exchange partition as a small network hard drive as well when I
am back in Sweden so that I can exchange files within the home network
as well without a USB stick.
Afterwards it was time to choose one of the around 600(?) available Linux distributions ... As you only learn stuff if you do it on your own and do it properly I chose Arch Linux. This comes along with nothing except the basic Linux OS. No graphical user interface (GUI), no drivers, no internet, no nothing ... Yay, so much fun ... ;)
I burnt the Linux image to a CD (yes, my laptop is old enough that it still has a DVD drive) to boot it with ImgBurn. Before I tried to boot it from SD card but my laptop seems to refuse booting from SD card in principle. -.- So CD it was. From the Arch Linux live environment I then installed the OS onto the hard drive following this tutorial. (Actually that is all the magic behind becoming a computer "expert": Read and try.) Most of the tutorial worked fine, only for the wifi part I had to change some of the commands by trial and error - it seems that the author mixed some old commands with some new effects ...
Anyhow, afterwards I installed the GNOME GUI following the Arch Linux Wiki Beginner's Guide. This took me as long as installing the OS itself. -.- This time it was for my stupidity and impatience which is inherent to every physicist/computer scientist nursery child that always prefers trying on his own rather than following boring guides. ;)
Actually I did not want to install a GUI at all to internalise "how to command shell". ;) But then I realised that I will have to read a lot in future and that I will not always have a second machine to use a browser so I installed a GUI ... Looks really nice by the way so it pays off optically as well. And installing it teaches you a lot about how OS work. :)
Last of course (which I did before installing a GUI but you can do it afterwards as well) I needed a boot loader that recognises both the Linux and the Windows OS. I just used the standard GRUB boot loader for that. The installation guide above includes this.
So after some hours of blood, sweat and tears (and coffee) I really managed to install my favoured dual boot system. No big deal once you know how to do it but first you have to try it on your own. Mission accomplished. :)
You should try installing a dual boot system as well! ;)
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