Dual booting fun

No, not my MacBook Pro. I'd been hearing a lot about a new bunch of eye candy called xgl that runs under Linux. (Actually, I first heard about it on This Week in Tech.) I wanted to check it out but knew that doing so under Parallels on the MacBook Pro wouldn't be fast enough. So, I decided to get back into the world of dual-booting, by setting up one of my PCs to dual-boot WinXP and Ubuntu Linux. This went much MUCH easier than I expected. Kinda.

Friday night, I did some research. Turns out that there's a SystemRescueCD that will let you resize NTFS partitions. I was only using about 40 GB of my 160 GB drive, so I booted from the System Rescue CD and ran QtParted and carved off a 30 GB partition for installing Ubuntu 6.06. (This was guided by a good illustrated tutorial on how to dual-boot Windows and Linux, although the latter parts of the tutorial deal with older versions of Ubuntu and thus don't line up with the current installation procedure...)

Snag #1: the Ubuntu installer didn't seem to like the partition without it being formatted first. So I rebooted the SystemRescueCD, broke up the new 30GB of free space into a "/" and a "swap" partition, and reformatted them as ext3 and linux-swap. Restarted with the Ubuntu install disc, used the "manual partition" option, picked the appropriate partitions and deselected the others, and install went smoothly (it even set up my dual-boot options for me automatically). This took about 2 hours in all... stayed up a smidge too late Friday night.

Saturday, I consulted this excellent tutorial on getting Ubuntu all spiffied up, including installing drivers, automatix, and xgl. Snag #2: the instructions for installing the ATI drivers didn't work for me. Did some more searches and found out there were problems with my ATI card (a Radeon 9000 Pro). Found the workarounds (it involved replacing some library, but this is all moot by the way as you'll see...), did them, and I was back on track.

I did all the fun stuff for getting xgl running and... nothing. No cool graphics, certainly, and some weird bug where the main menu was wiped out. I then started checking around, and it appeared that my dumb old Radeon card just wasn't going to work with xgl. Grr, how annoying. That all took me probably a couple more hours off and on on Saturday.

Sunday I went to Staples to get a big honking uninterruptible power supply to power my VoIP setup if we have another tree take out a transformer as happened on the Fourth of July (thereby losing power for 12 hours). Lo and behold, they had a GeForce 5500 on clearance for $60. I was sure that the answer to my woes was to go nVidia rather than ATI--their Linux drivers are just plain better. I was sure I could get it cheaper online, but there it was, and it was only $60. So I got it. Darn spur-of-the-moment decisions.

About 9PM I deinstalled all the ATI crap out of Windows, and installed the new card and Nvidia drivers. Snag #4: stupid me bought a card with no DVI output. I can't believe they still sell cards with only VGA outputs! Well, they do at stupid old Staples, anyway. Got a VGA cable and connected it to my display. Got WinXP up and running, then tried to get the Ubuntu install I'd already done working with the Nvidia card. I came close but didn't quite get there, so I just reformatted those partitions and reinstalled from the Ubuntu CD. Redid all the steps for getting Ubuntu spiffified, did all the xgl stuff again, rebooted and picked the xgl session (all told taking another couple hours, I'm getting good at this Linux thing, lemme tell ya) and...

WOW! Cool eye candy. Wavey windows, cube-transition like OS X when going from desktop to desktop, dialing up or down a window's transparency with the mouse wheel. Neat stuff, and that's just the default settings... I haven't even gotten into the program that lets you adjust these options (I think it's called compiz).

So now I'll probably spend another $40 to get a video card WITH DVI output, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the results, and that it's a LOT easier to get a dual-boot machine setup than it used to be. Believe me, if the above doesn't sound easy, trust me, it is relative to what it used to be like.