[Offtopic] Sharing linux and Windows files on a dual boot machine

Mon Jul 14 14:28:53 EST 2008

Jim and Others,
I have just returned from ubuntu back to windows. 
I'll add that i will only be doing it for about 12 weeks whilst i edit
and create the college year book. Adobe indesign does not seem to like
running under WINE.

Firstly i used the ubuntu 8.04 64 bit edition as i have a dual core
machine. Now that was my first correct decision, stability was great,
speed was amazing.

One thing that was missing was a great tool called automatix Ended
development at 7.10. Very useful tool to install that would download and
get other major application like open office and install MP3 support and
DVD codec's.

However saying that synaptic and apt-get are excellent tools. One of my
pieces of advice is to set the Repository for updates to one of the
Australian servers. I was lucky in the fact the Internode mirror the
ubuntu, debian and red hat repositories and as a customer i get those
downloads unmetered.(saves a few gigs over a month)

Except for no 64 bit version of flash being available (there is a way to
use the 32bit version) it has been brilliant.

Regards
Andrew Weir

Andrew Weir

Information Technology Co-ordinator

Thomas Carr College

35 Thomas Carr Drive,

Tarneit, VIC 3029

(P) (03) 8734 2566

(F) (03) 9748 4388

(E) andrew.weir at thomascarr.vic.edu.au

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________________________________

From: offtopic-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:offtopic-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Jim Maunder
Sent: Monday, 14 July 2008 12:07 PM
To: Information Technology Teachers' Offtopic Mailing List
Subject: [Offtopic] Sharing linux and Windows files on a dual boot
machine

Hello Ros and others - 

Long story to make up for the possum stirring.

One of my recent little home jobs has been to recover files from my
daughter's laptop - it dual booted Windows and Fedora linux, but the
Fedora side became mangled and would not load. It contained amongst
other things her BSc(Hons) thesis written with LaTeX, and although she
had a copy on the Mt Stromlo servers, she wanted the one on the lappy so
she could fix the punctuation and grammar. She wanted me to:
1) recover the files on the linux side
2) remove the Fedora installation and install Ubuntu

Task 1 proved to be the trickier - the obvious approach was to run
Ubuntu live from a CD, then copy files to an external USB HDD, but this
does not work straight off - I got file access denied messages. A bit of
Googling found why - it seems the gid numbers in Ubuntu and Fedora are
different for ordinary users. I was not game to try 'chown' as a
workaround in case it mucked things up. Now I knew that Ubuntu/Kubuntu
reads and writes to NTFS partions quite happily, so I wondered if it
would work the other way - could Windows read Ext3 partions. More
Googling quickly found two solutions, and the one that worked best is
Ext2IFS for Windows 

http://www.fs-driver.org/ 

After installation this searches your system and allows the user to
assign drive letters to Ext2 and Ext3 partitions. I tried it on the
sacrificial lappy here at work and it worked like a charm.

At home I installed this driver on my daughter's lappy, got drive
letters etc., then found and copied the files off to a caddy. There were
some problems with file and folder names that contained illegal
characters (as far as Windows was concerned), but that was fixed with
Ubuntu from a CD and peace and calm returned to the Maunder household.

Task 2 was quite interesting for me, because it made me come to grips
with Ubuntu, when previously I would give up if something did not work
immediately, and I was only considering getting it to work in our work
environment. Also, I had a look at what is needed to edit with LaTeX.
See http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html I knew that this has been
around for many years in the unix and DEC VAX world, and it seems that
the Linux people prefer 'Kile' as the IDE (integrated development
environment).  http://kile.sourceforge.net/ Some more Googling for a
Windows LaTeX IDE found 'WinShell' http://www.winshell.de/ which has a
similar look and feel to 'Kile'. So, back to Ubuntu. 

Again playing with the aforementioned sacrificial laptop (so I could get
the installation right before doing the daughter's machine), Ubuntu went
on easily and then I had to find out how to install software, which
means getting the Synaptic to work, which means getting the network to
work etc. I found that network proxies are set in about 3 places,
(system, browser and Synaptic) and that the NDS gateway (I think that's
what it is) is not always picked up automatically. I found out what you
have to do to play MP3 files.

The end result is that I would happily use Ubuntu on a home machine, as
it does everything I need to do and most of the things I'd like to do
(mostly music stuff). Maybe I'll try to get 'Half-Life' running under
'Wine', but that's what the Windows partition is for.

rgds
Jim (who hopes you don't mind a bit of off-topic ramble)

At 06:04 PM 02/07/2008, you wrote:

	Hello all - hope your holidays are fun

	Wow!! This is great - now I can have the best of all three
worlds...

	This seems like a great way to introduce yourself to Ubuntu
Linux (although the learning curve is not that steep) without dedicating
a whole machine to it, or having to worry about partitions and dual
booting.

http://lifehacker.com/358208/seamlessly-run-linux-apps-on-your-windows-d
esktop 
	...
	Roslyn Meadows
	Head of ICT Implementation
	Head of Assessment and Reporting
	Bentleigh Secondary College 

-----------------------------------------------------------
We have to use this Disclaimer

Views, opinions, etc. expressed reflect those of the author and not
Ruyton Girls' School 
-----------------------------------------------------------

Jim Maunder
Laptop and PC Support Technician
Ruyton Girls School
Melbourne, Australia
ph 03 9290 9374

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