Goodbye Windows

Yesterday i tried and chose the option to boot Windows. Because i had a dual Windows and Fedora computer and hadn't done it in a long time. Windows on a set of partitions and Fedora on a different set. After, i spent two hours downloading and installing Windows updates. I mean watch the computer while downloading and installing 138 updates. About 4 times more time than Fedora 17. Then that i tried and launched whatever version of Explorer is the last one for Windows 7 and tried to see my blog in Explorer. But i ran into the problem of having to re-zoom each site cause by default i think Explorer does not remember the last zoom you used for a site.

Then i had sort of a revelation, fueled by and developed in the waiting time. Since most of the employers nowadays let programmers chose whether to use Windows or Linux and some force you to use Linux, i realized. Linux is more productive in an office environment. You get more things done. Is that simple. I couldn't possibly write 277 posts in one year on my blog while pampering Windows and falling in a trance every time seeing the animation at boot time.

 Then, i used a partitioning program, cleaned those partitions and installed Fedora as the second boot. Yes, Fedora 17, for the second time. I spoke before of the advantages. By doing so instead of plainly re-installing you can have a clean install and a very smooth transitioning. You can always choose the old one at boot time. You can share data while transitioning. You can pick only what you need from the mess left behind.

But this time for me it was just for experimenting. What i was anxious about is i could not imagine how you can have on a hard drive two / partitions, two /boot, two /home, etc. and not confuse the two OS.

Here's how it's done. At installation, (i used the live CD), the installer sees only the Linux partitions you just formatted on the free chosen space. The others belonging to the older installation are at that moment just some unmounted partitions on a hard drive. It will also find the other Fedora loader on the other boot partition and add it to the grub boot menu, with a slightly different name (and maybe a warning, i can't remember). After booting one of the two, each will see only its own partitions and the other's will be just unmounted devs with the option to mount them and transfer whatever data you need.

Actually, nothing to do but install the second instance of Fedora.

Actually, i never tried and chose the other, older Fedora from the boot menu. I just did now, after i wrote the first paragraphs, to make sure it works. What happens is because of some minor problem, instead of Fedora animated logo at boot time, i get to see the some messages scrolling while the boot happens. Boot time is the same, it's working the same. With file manager i'm seeing the newer partitions, with their corresponding sizes but not named, as unmounted. But i'm not going to try to fix that one, i don't need it anymore.

1/6/13 5:32 PM PDT. Just fixed the "minor" problem. Manually added the newest kernel entry from the older grub.cfg into the newer grub.cfg. Now i can boot them both with no problem. Two identical OSs on a same computer!

1/6/13 11:12 PM PDT. Thought maybe i should write what i think is exciting about this. Although i accidentally discovered the possibility while trying to learn partitioning with an XP installation disk long time ago, when i installed XP twice (LOL) by mistake and got a menu at boot time asking me which one to boot, i never thought of the advantages until a few month ago.

Any OS, including Fedora, although not nearly as much as Windows, degrades irreversibly in time. Although there are numerous softwares out there that claim that can restore your system as it was when you first installed it (bought it for the most people), the problem is too vast and complex to be solved like this.

Every time you install and un-install software, or work with sizable amounts of data, the hard disk gets fragmented, the registry file gets corrupted and remnants of the older softwares haunt your hard drive. When nowadays on an average computer you have hundreds of thousands of of files, it is very hard for any cleaning software to automatically undo the mess.

And then there's the updates. Every time you update a package, the newer files pile up in top of the others, often leaving your computer with several versions of the same packages, of course, the older ones being useless, but hard to remove due to the precision and the know how required to only delete the useless not the usable or the current version.

And then there's the internet temporary files. Every time you open a site, scores of files are being saved on your hard drive and depending on your browser's settings they are being rolled out like in a first in last out basis. If you don't use administrative measures like i am keeping all of them on a separate partition, they will populate every empty space of your hard drive contributing to the fragmentation.

And on a Windows computer with no separate partitions no matter how big the hard drive is, the mess is unimaginable.

And i am not pretending here to finish the list of problems that add to the cluttering of an OS in time.

That's why among administrators the concept of a clean install has been born. What that means? It means you save whatever data you need, wipe clean the hard drive and install it anew, then the programs and then try to restore everything you added up into a workable status by putting the data back little by little. But this is a very time consuming process, and although you will have a faster computer, you will never have it the same way as it was before you cleaned it.

(Actually that's what i believe cloud computing would be so successful, because it keeps your data away from your own messy computer.)

So why all this talk in this post? Because what i've stumbled upon could bring a totally new prospective into maintaining a computer.

Supposedly you or the manufacturer reserved some space for this purpose when first installing the OS. Supposedly you have all your data separated from the programs in a different partition or partitions (not absolutely necessary).

All you have to do is install for the second time your OS into the reserved space with the programs and try and pick the data from the other partition without deleting nothing on as needed basis while still keeping the option of booting the computer with the old system that might be slow but you are so familiar with. The transition will be much smoother and you can delete the old partition(s) when you feel you don't need them anymore or when you think you need that space for anything else including repeating the above cycle.

And above all, no emotions from the possibility of loosing data while totally and truly renewing your computer.

As an example, what i just did, i installed Fedora 17 and the updates and all the programs for the second times on some free space on the hard drive, creating some sort of a mirroring of the old system, then copied the username directory from the old installation /home into the new /home partition, and voila, all the familiar icons popped on the desktop, and i was ready to go in about 2 hours in total, and this while keeping the option of booting the old system. Everything was done mostly automatically by the Fedora installer (except choosing the free space and partition types and sizes, from the live CD, with only a one time manually editing of the grub.cfg file, as mentioned above.