[TriLUG] Installing Windows on Ubuntu

[Tarus Balog]

Gang:

After an eight year love affair with the OS X desktop, I am finally
divorcing myself from Apple products and I have moved to a Linux desktop.

After a lot of trial and error, I've decided on Ubuntu, although the
purpose of this post is not to incite a Linux desktop flamewar. Despite
the advances in the Linux desktop, I still have the occasional need to
use Windows, so I left a partition open on the disk for Windows 7.

Now, under OS X I used VMWare to access this partition as a VM, and I
could also boot into it. As I think about installing Windows on the new
machine, I have some questions and concerns.

1) Is the Windows installer going to nuke grub, and if so how to do I
prevent it? I'd like to continue to use grub as my bootloader.

2) What virtualization solution should I use? I used KVM to create some
Linux VMs without problem, but in my research I am not sure that is the
best thing to use for Windows. I see a lot of references to VirtualBox.
My main goal is to be able to natively boot into the Windows partition
as well as access that same instance of Windows as a VM.

3) Any tricks to that last part? I've seen something about adding a
hardware profile, but I'm pretty much a Windows n00b.

Thanks in advance for any advice and help.

-T
-- 
Tarus BALOG, OpenNMS Maintainer             Main:   +1 919 533 0160
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.                     Fax:    +1 773 345 3645
Email: tarus at opennms.org                    URL: http://www.opennms.org
PGP Key Fingerprint: 8945 8521 9771 FEC9 5481  512B FECA 11D2 FD82 B45C