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I need Windows for some reason on my main computer whereto i'm going to install Salix 14.2 as my my basic OS. Now i do not have any experience with that, only double boot with MacOS and Linux on some old G4 Powermacs (using yaboot). Is there somewhere a how to what's needed for Lilo and for the formatting of the hd?

TIA for your patience!

If your machine supports UEFI, this is probably the best option, or maybe even the only one. Depending on your BIOS settings (EFI or "legacy"), the Salix installer will act accordingly - if it is booted using EFI, the installed system will be too.

The worst outcome in either case is that initially, you can only boot Salix. From inside that Salix installation, you can set up dual booting with Windows. However, please do back up your data just in case.

In the case of an EFI installation, one easy way to manage dual booting is with reFind, which can be installed from the repositories. If you search the forum, you may find some helpful threads about this.

By the way, I have an old Mac that is probably slightly earlier than that (from memory, G2?) and I gave up on running Linux on it in the end. The bootloader is written in Forth! I am hopeful you will find this considerably easier.

mimosa wrote:If your machine supports UEFI, this is probably the best option, or maybe even the only one. Depending on your BIOS settings (EFI or "legacy"), the Salix installer will act accordingly - if it is booted using EFI, the installed system will be too.

How do i establish if the machine supports uefi or not? Actually, i've running a crippled installation of Manjaro OpenRC - but i'm well intent to turn back into the slackware world

mimosa wrote:The worst outcome in either case is that initially, you can only boot Salix. From inside that Salix installation, you can set up dual booting with Windows. However, please do back up your data just in case.

In the case of an EFI installation, one easy way to manage dual booting is with reFind, which can be installed from the repositories. If you search the forum, you may find some helpful threads about this.

I'll look at it The practical problem is: I need Windows (10) for teaching materials i've to work with (for the moment i'm helping me out with a AMD based Samsung Ultrabook which now runs Windows 10, because it was nearly impossible to use it under linux or bsd - it was running always ultrahot and crashing - for overheating). The machine i'd use for the dual install is the latest Sony Vaio laptop, icore 7, nvdia graphics and 16 gig of ram. Eventually, could i run windows 10 thru VirtualBox as well?

mimosa wrote:By the way, I have an old Mac that is probably slightly earlier than that (from memory, G2?) and I gave up on running Linux on it in the end. The bootloader is written in Forth! I am hopeful you will find this considerably easier.

G3 probably, i'm not aware of g2 processors ... (?) You mean the yaboot bootloader?

I'd like to stick with lilo, or eventually syslinux, because i'm under the impression, that grub(2) is too complex (a bit like lightdm as login manager, which is not light but overwhelmingly complex).

By the sound of it your machine almost certainly is EFI capable, and that is the way to go. Don't worry about Lilo or Grub, the installer will take care of it.

To proceed (and to confirm this) go into your BIOS and make sure you are booting using EFI, not "Legacy" - but with "Secure boot" turned off. The way these settings are managed varies according to the BIOS. Extensive information can be found by searching the internet, because this is a universal problem. Since you installed the other Linux, it is likely though that everything will work as it is.

It is important that you get this set right before booting the installation image. Probably everything will be fine, but some troubleshooting may be required.

If you want to change the partitions, I recommend using Gparted from a Live USB. But simplest will be just to re-use the existing Linux partition or partitions.

Once you have installed your Salix system, boot into it and install reFind. Please search the forum for this. Then you will get a choice between Salix and Windows at boot.

About the old Mac, Forth is used in the machine's native bootloader, or firmware as it is called here:
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/w ... _boot.html

Yes, with that hardware, running Windows in a VM sounds like a good option as well. I'm not sure how you'd negotiate installation and licensing issues though. Since there is probably plenty of room for both on the hard disk, that might be simpler than virtualisation. In the long term, perhaps you will find ways to use Linux for all your needs.

mimosa wrote:
[ . . . ]

Yes, with that hardware, running Windows in a VM sounds like a good option as well. I'm not sure how you'd negotiate installation and licensing issues though. Since there is probably plenty of room for both on the hard disk, that might be simpler than virtualisation. In the long term, perhaps you will find ways to use Linux for all your needs.

First of all, thanks a lot for your patience. I'll get back to you eventually ... It's difficult to see, how i could use *.exe files within Linux - if not thru emulation or dual boot. Unfortunately ...

This is slightly off-topic, but .exe files are presumably applications. You can either run them by virtualising or emulating Windows (or just in Windows) - or you can do whatever it is natively in Linux. Part of the MS business model is to convince you that that isn't workable, because of compatibility issues (your clients or boss expect you to use whatever format) or killer functionality that is only provided by Windows-only software.

If you're interested in exploring open source options for your particular needs, perhaps you could open a separate topic; but anyway, lots of people do retain Windows for all sorts of reasons of this kind. I haven't used it myself for many years.

To reply:

1) Big thankyou to all who contributed to make this Salix 14.2 (and slackware, indirectly too, onbviuosly!): The installation went through without any pain or problem (differently from my experience with Salix 13 - which needed a lot of work, for me, to make it viable. Now i'm going to "tweak" mate (substitute the windowmanager - to have a tiling one: for my needs jwm with its basic tiling options would be enough; different default prgrms like viewnior or sakura ecc. ecc.). And: I'll see how it goes with the installation of windows 10 on a separate partition. Btw, a question in this regard: Is there a software for linux, which allows to switch between windows and linux without the need to log out/log-in. I mean with windows running natively, not in emulation (like qemu or virtualbox)?

2) Never ever i've used windows before (my "computer past" passes by Apple II and IIGS, Powermac with MacOS, BeOS and then Ubuntu on ppc and finally different flavours of Linux, like Debian, Arch/Manjaro, Salix and Alpine) but now, i'm in a situation i really need it: I have to use, for teaching languages to immigrants the materials they are giving to me and those often, do not have even a MacOS version, only windows. I'd prefer that not to be necessary but in this moment it's like this. To have a fallback, i installed W 10 on a Samsung ultrabook, which never ever ran fine under linux (linux does not like so much the amd processors and boards ).

Switching natively, no way as far as I know, as that would mean switching usage of all resources (CPU, RAM, devices) from one system to another.

But for your needs, running Windows in a virtual machine like VirtualBox in full screen or near full screen mode would be enough, I think.

Just start or move the VM in another desk aka workspace and use the desk switcher of the Mate panel to switch from one system to the other.

Thanks - that's a good idea. I'll try if it works - my main problem are with didactical films and additional into the film linked materials which are started and shown by a proprietarian software which in the school is also used to use the whiteboard. Anyway ...

I forgot to ask: Through the installation a commited, probably, a mistake: I didn't change the installers preconfigured xfs format for the (boot) partition which it had to format. But i did not format the /home partition- so that rested ext4 formatted. Is that a problem? Or would there, eventually, be a way to change the format of the one or the other - to have the system not to deal with 2 different formats (?).

Thanks a lot in advance.

That's not a problem at all to have several filesystems coexisting for different partitions.

If you want to change the filesystem of your root (/) partition you will have to reinstall Salix after that.

If you want to change the filesystem of your /home partition, you will have to first back up its content, change the file system, then restore the backup.

But again, I see no need to change anything. Also (I write this more for other readers) I personally see no clear benefit in having a separate partition for /home, but maybe in some specific cases. Some people do that to ease transitioning to a new system|version, but in my humble opinion it's as easy and effective to back up the content of /home, for instance to an USB hard disk, install the new system|version and restore the files. Plus, it's a good occasion to make some house cleaning and you will have to take care of the (mostly hidden) config files in $HOME anyway. Sorry for the digression.