We never found the “grup” in all of the pages of Windows 10. In a previous session we never got anywhere near getting a dual boot set up following a different set of instructions that didn’t mention a “grup” command line and those instructions even had a video.
Is there somewhere a straight forward set of clear instructions to create a dual boot for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.4?
the unfortunate answer is that it is far easier (and more efficient) to post a 10-step (or however many steps, but not 1000) guide or 3 minute video about dual booting linux and windows than address the fact that there are so many makes and models of computers on the market that there is no way to make one set of instructions that will work in all cases. the simple fact that my system requires me to press the enter key and others use del or esc or F1 to get into the bios/uefi settings means that set of instructions would have to either explicitly detail every key for every make and model (for the first hour or so) or gloss over the variability and say something like “you need to change the boot order in bios”.
because adding a second operating system introduces so many variables (grub bootloader, bios, legacy or uefi?) that a regular windows user has never had to even know existed before, the undertaking is not as easy as it might first seem. that doesn’t mean it is impossible or not worth trying.
if you post some questions or comments about the places you get stuck, you might get some helpful answers. even there it is important to remember that you are getting answers from volunteers who are doing their best to guide you usually based on their own personal linux experience, not trained ubuntu-paid professional helpdesk workers.
if you have scanned through this or similar forums, you can see that some threads or questions get solved and others do not. based on raw probabilities it should be possible to get ubuntu 18.04 on your computer, but no one nor any one set of instructions can guarantee that outcome.
Then is there an alternative to dual boot, other than that Virtual Box thing we tried and did no get working past the opening screen of Ubuntu 18.4?
In other words, is it possible, with Windows 10 shut down, to boot into Ubuntu 18.4? My Dell PC has a CD drive, but I don’t know if it will “burn” a CD. With that Virtual Box thing we tried to create a bootable stick with “Rufus”, but I’m not sure it went well since we had the problem of not getting beyond the greeting screen for Ubuntu.
I don’t care if Window 10 is not running if I can get to Ubuntu because I can always use a stick to transfer anything between the various programs.
i have heard of it. from the link you posted, it is called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). i don’t use windows often and i have never used WSL. in my opinion the most important part of that slide regarding this conversation was this part:
You can hack a graphical interface into existence, but WSL2’s intended as a command line-style interface
to me that translates as “the average user will have a harder time trying to install this than even virtualbox”.
Then is there an alternative to dual boot, other than that Virtual Box thing we tried and did no get working past the opening screen of Ubuntu 18.4?
In other words, is it possible, with Windows 10 shut down, to boot into Ubuntu 18.4? My Dell PC has a CD drive, but I don’t know if it will “burn” a CD. With that Virtual Box thing we tried to create a bootable stick with “Rufus”, but I’m not sure it went well since we had the problem of not getting beyond the greeting screen for Ubuntu.
Is there some software better than Rufus to create a bootable stick to boot Ubuntu with no Win 10 running?
Will these CD drives also burn a CD boot disk if I get a blank CD?
I don’t care if Window 10 is not running if I can get to Ubuntu because I can always use a stick to transfer anything between the various programs.
i am taking this part out of order because it is the quickest and easiest to address. the ubuntu 18.04 iso file that you would need to download won’t fit on a cd. if you want to try this method, you would have to do so with a dvd.
that being said, you would obviously have to find out if your cd drive is also a dvd drive (most newer ones are. can you use it to play movies in windows 10?) and, if so, will it also write dvd’s.
if you are able to successfully and properly burn (please make note of the instruction to “burn a disc image”. “writing” files to a dvd is different and will not result in a bootable dvd) an ubuntu dvd, you will then need to figure out how to instruct your computer to boot from something other than windows.
this is partly connected to the point i mentioned before about needing to press the enter key when my system boots to enter the bios or uefi settings. on my system i can also press a separate key (F11) to tell it to boot from an alternate source.
you will have to figure out how to do either of these (depending on what your system is capable of) in order to finally boot into the dvd.
on some systems (mine included), before it boots into the operating system there is a message on the screen that says something like “press F1 to enter settings”. hopefully yours has something similar.
if you make it that far and are able to get into your system’s bios/uefi setting, you should probably pop back in to see how to proceed from there.
there are alternatives to rufus. to determine which is better, each user needs to see what gives them the best results. i personally recommend rufus because i have read in a few different posts that it works reliably and well with linux these days.
i haven’t used either so wouldn’t be of any help doing so. my recommendation would still be to circle back to rufus and see if you could get what you need out of it. you say
but trying to install ubuntu in virtualbox and using rufus to write a usb are two entirely different procedures so i would imagine that is why rufus didn’t yield the results you were expecting.
Are you dual booting from one disk or two?
Is your system MBR or EFI?
Do you have Windows 10 install and does it boot?
Did you install Linux yet?
Where are you in the process? Planning, installing, got errors? @RetiredGuy, I hear you. I went thru this dual boot thing about 2 years ago. Had to restore my Windows system a couple times, from learning how to do get dual boot working.
It’s really not as bad as it seems, it just all new to us Windows users.
@RetiredGuy, don’t bother with a CD. Yes, it should work if you burn the iso correctly.
Most people seem to use a flash drive.
There are utility program you can download that will run in Windows that will make a bootable flash drive.
I use W10 and a program called CD Burner XP (https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home) to burn my CD/DVD for Linux using their ISO’s (https://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/). This is 1.98GB ISO and you will need DVD-R or a DVD+R, I usually use the DVD-R, because it is more readily available. You can install cdburnerxp in W10 and you can just drag and drop the ISO into the program and it will do the rest, and it will burn a live version of Ubuntu 18.04 that will boot your PC. Repurposed Acer Ast 180 PC Take a look at this post I made, it is Windows Vista in a dual boot with Linux Mint, the same procedures are involved with W10, the only the big difference is in the partition tables of the drive, this one is for MBR while yours may be GPT and require a small EFI partition for booting.
Personally, unless you are running on a desktop you should never bother with dual booting. Many years ago I screwed up my hard drive by trying to dual boot Windows and Linux (I forget the distribution). My desktop systems have removable drive bays and I just remove ALL DRIVES except the one that I wish to install a new OS.
After that it is fairly painless to configure grub to boot from other hard disks. Actually I usually just re-configure the BIOS to boot from a different hard drive.
I am saying this as a hardware engineer, who for many years had to spec out white box components for workstations used in Television Broadcast.
So what alternatives are there for running Windows and Linux on the same system ?(assume this is a laptop).
As been mentioned before WSL (now WSL2 for later versions of Windows 10) is available on Windows 10. It is pretty good. Apparently you can also run X11 apps on WSL2. Having X11 on your local system means that you can run individual gui apps but not the whole Desktop Environment.
Also , you can run free software like the VirtualBox hypervisor and then run Linux as a VM. Alternatively you can just install Linux as your Main OS and run Windows 10 as a VirtualBox VM.
Most processors these days have many cores , so you are not giving up much performance if you run a different OS in a VM. In fact you could argue that the processors are really made to do this. My latest Desktop system is running a Ryzen 9 3900X which has 12 cores or 24 threads. I purchased it primarily to run a Virtual Workload.
You need to ask yourself, “What benefits do I get from running Linux on bare metal?” Are you running Linux games? The only thing I can think of at this date is enhanced security, especially if you decide to implement special measures , like encrypting the hard drive,SELinux or AppArmor, or you are a Linux developer and want to natively use Linux native features like Kubernetes or Docker.
Remember Linux is not guaranteed to run on arbitrary PC hardware. Companies like Red Hat , Suse etc , maintain a HCL (hardware compatibility list) of products that are known to run without issues. There is a cottage industry of Linux Hardware Vendors that will sell you a Linux based Laptop that doesn’t have issues with the trackpad, sound card, sleeping etc.
Again to wrap up, why do you need to run Linux on Bare metal?
As a retired senior I can’t afford a new PC or lap top to run Linux. I have a Dell Inspirion that is supposed to be OK to run Win 10 and Linux.
I don’t do games, ever. I am in the process of trying to write a book to put up on the Web. From my years early on of learning to use a computer, I was using Unix and the vi + ed editors and loved them.
My data I am working with is huge text files that I want to organize into a history type document.
I am not an engineer and a lot of the terms you use just fly over the top of my head. I have seen the word “grub” in terms of getting Linux, but have never, yet, seen that page.
My former employers, 2 Fed Agencies didn’t send me to any school to learn computers and programing, they just said, here learn use and teach others to use software programs and related stuff. I had to self teach data base implementation. Never had the chance to learn programing, but self taught HTML to teach use of software programs.
We tried to implement the VirtualBox and got to the opening page of Linus and nothing beyond that for whatever reason we could not fin out so we changed over to now trying to set up using UNetbootin. I need help with it and my daughter is my helper who knows a lot more about this stuff than me.
So that’s where I am. If I can’t get to the point to have all of Linux Ubuntu, or if it can’t do what I need, then I am stuck with Win 10 software. I would love to have a dedicated Linus PC, but it’s just not in the budget.
Thanks for the offer. Let me get back to you later this week. My daughter is registering her kids today for remote grade school for this quarter and tomorrow is a runoff election and she is a supervisor for a number of polling places. Wednesday she has some other commitments so it will be Thursday or Friday before I can get her over here. We will report then and again, Thank You!
Hi retired guy-
I apologize for using too much Jargon. Just a couple of further suggestions.
Did you know that vim (Vi Improved) , which is on all Linux distributions, is available for Windows?
Look here: https://www.vim.org/download.php
Also as an alternative to using WSL to install Ubuntu you can use cygwin:
Cygwin has all the open source tools like vim bash etc , that will run on Windows.
This is what I used when I was saddled with a Windows 7 laptop and Desktop when I was a working as a Unix/Linux Systems Admin. (You can’t have anything decent, that is company policy.)
While you are mostly correct, I wonder why you never mention “speed” in the whole VM talk. Especially if you have a low spec computer, running a VM isn’t something you can easily handle. Dual booting can, depending on the setup and the overall situation, have an extreme amount of performance benefits.
As a hardware engineer, this should be obvious.