What is Dual Booting?
Dual Boot, also know as “multi-booting” is the process of setting up your computer to have two, or more, operating systems on the same hard drive (or sometimes separate hard drives), allowing you to decide when you turn on the computer, which Operating System you want to run.
More technically, you are not actually “dual booting” the operating systems, but you are simply setting up the computer to allow one, or the other to run at any given time. Operating systems installed on a hard drive to not interact, or access one another.
However, in some cases, you might share files between the two operating systems. For instance, you might have a partition on your hard drive called “/home/Pirate” (which is your user name in Linux for instance) and you want to access the directory called “/home/Pirate/income_taxes” from both Linux and from Windows. You could set your machine up to allow this, but this is typically not why you run
Linux in the first place.
For our purposes here, we want to escape Big Tech, and continuing to USE Windows (or Apple, or whichever OS you’re using) is not really “escaping”.
In reality, folks dual boot for having both OSes on their machine to do different things. You can generally find a similar, Open Source software that will do what you can do in Windows. It isn’t NECESSARY to keep both OSes.
Except for one consideration. You’re completely uncomfortable moving away from Windows/Apple for the time being so you want to experiment, or play with the OS.
Three ways you can do this are as follows:
- Dual Booting
- Booting Linux on your Windows/Apple computer from a CD
- Booting Linux on your Windows/Apple computer from a Flash drive
In the case of #1 above, you would have to do some extra work, re-partition your hard drive to make space and separate out the two Operating systems.
In the case of 2 and 3 above, you can simply boot your disc or flash drive and use the OS until you are comfortable in switching. In the case of #3 in some Linux Distro you can start the OS in “persistence mode”. (Note: not all can do this). You assign an amount of memory on your flash drive to saving data, and you can store some information on the flash drive.
This will allow you to boot that flash drive pretty much from ANY computer and keep certain information available to you, no matter where you go.
So – Dual Booting (or even multi-booting with many OSes) is useful if you really need to keep Windows or Apple OS on your machine for a little longer.
My favorite reason for it is to multi-boot with Mint, Kali and a Ham Radio Linux Distro. That way I am still using LINUX, but I have different resources for what I am doing. (Kali is a hacker Linux, used for testing networks, troubleshooting, and basic hacking things).
I hope this little article explains few more things to the newly initiated here.
@Pirate_Fletcher (aka American Patriot)
