Dual booting tip

As soon as I opened up my new notebook, I installed ubuntu edgy. It was my intent to remove windows altogether. But, this being the first copy of Windows XP that I have purchased, I decided to leave it on. The Ubuntu installer was able to resize my NTFS windows partition, install the operating system and configure GRUB with minimal interaction on my part. Configuring fstab so that my Windows partition was mounted read/write automatically on boot was slightly more involved, but I have seen that process documented quite extensivly elsewere. What I had never seen, and honestly had never looked for before now, was a way to mount Linux partitions-- ext3 to be more precise-- in Windows. That was when I found Ext2IFS, an installable file system driver for the ext2 and ext3 file systems. You can find the program's home page at http://www.fs-driver.org The install process was simple, just a standard windows executable installer, and the results were immediately visible. The installer allows you to choose what drive letter to asign to you ext partitions, but to change them you just have to look for the new control panel applet "IFS Drives." For those of you that use itunes, it seems to lock down a player to a single drive letter. In my case, the drive letter "E:" was associated with my ipod and was also default assignment for my home partition, if you have applications installed to a USB drive that is not attached to the system at the time of the driver install, this may be an issue as well.