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Bert · New Member Joined: 30 Nov 2001 Posts: 5

Is loading 3 or more OSs a practicle idea, given enough hd space and ram?

I've got a 3 or 4 year old Dell machine that came with Vista. It's an 86.2 g hd, and when I bought the used machine I upped it from 2 to 4 gigs of ram. Right after that I had Ubuntu elbow it's way onto the hd and Ubuntu's pretty much all I use except for web sites that insist on IE. I don't store much on the hd or do much graphical or gaming work; both Ubuntu and Vista read 70% or more of free space

However, I'd like to also try the Haiku OS. Is it worth the risks of mess ups, or should I wait until I get a new machine in 5 or 6 years? I'm no wizard at dealing with partitioning - Ubuntu did a great job on it's own when I installed that. Will Haiku do as well?

Thanks for your time,
Bert

FKA_Christian · Posted: Sun Jul 25, 2010 12:19 pm Post subject:

One way to install multiple OSs without having to mess with partitioning is to install VirtualBox (or VMware player). Both can be downloaded at no cost. You can then create several virtual machines, each with their own OS and virtual hard drive. You can have several OSs running at the same time and instantly switch between them.

You don't waste as much disk space this way because you can create a virtual hard drive for Haiku that is say 20GB, but VirtualBox only takes up as much space as is actually used by Haiku.

It's also possible to take an existing OS and convert it into a virtual machine, and vice versa.
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Bert · New Member Joined: 30 Nov 2001 Posts: 5

Many thanks for the reply. Sounds like a great program - I'll check it out.