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I'm learning ubuntu and my teacher is using vmware. I remember my friend partioning his laptop disc or something, when he booted up his laptop he had a choice to start with windows or ubuntu. How did he do that? also is this the better way than using virtualbox?

wjandrea
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user2998413
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2 Answers2

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It depends on what you want to do. Your teacher needs a Virtual device for teaching purposes s it makes no sense to have to install Ubuntu just to teach and that's another great use for Virtual devices.

So it depends on what your intentions are, you either install it alone or alongside Windows or use a Virtual device or machine to run it and learn stuff that would be dangerous or risky as a learner to do on your own computer. I for one usually use it to learn and make all sorts of mistakes and because its a virtual device I will simple remake another and retry my learning aims till I have perfected. For dual booting see this link for more help.

George Udosen
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The trend is to use virtual machines instead of dual-booting, because dual-booting has two drawbacks:

  • changing systems is like rebooting, it requires stopping/restarting everything
  • it is like having two machines, even if some things can be shared

Previous drawbacks of virtual machines, like memory usage, or lack of virtualization of certain things (USB ports, graphics cards) have been either made benign by the capabilities of modern hardware or by improvement in the VM software.

Now, should you have Linux VMs on a Windows host or a Windows VM on a Linux host? Personally I run a Linux host that sometimes runs a Windows VM, but in your case a Windows host with Linux VMs would make sense, at least for a while. You can even avoid installing Linux by downloading pre-built "images" of all major distros for VirtualBox.

xenoid
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