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posted by
janrinok
on Friday March 14 2014, @01:35PM
from the is-that-the-sound-of-desperation-that-I-hear dept.
from the is-that-the-sound-of-desperation-that-I-hear dept.
skullz writes:
"Hot on the heels of Microsoft easing up access to the Windows Phone OS are rumors of dual Windows / Android phones, able to boot into either OS.
- Huawei Confirms Dual-OS Android-Windows Smartphone
- Huawei Might Launch Dual-OS Android-Windows Phone Handsets Too
The narrative so far is Android for personal use, Windows for BYOD to the office. I can see a company locking down a Windows Phone install so it can connect to Exchange and the company wifi but what would the two OSs share? Contacts and pictures? Would a bit of malware on one OS be isolated from the other?
It used to be that you would dual boot your Windows box with Linux, now that trend has reversed itself for your mobile. How far we have come."
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Windows / Android Dual Boot Phones
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 2) by snick on Friday March 14 2014, @01:44PM
As someone who long ago gave up on dual boot on the laptop, I have to say this is a terrible idea.
With a dual boot system you are constantly faced with "I need to reboot to do that." It is hopelessly frustrating.
Now, if they could run something like VMWare on the phone, and multiple OS instances (one for work, one for play) simultaneously I'm interested. Though I suspect that if it were attempted, the phone would burst into flames.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 14 2014, @02:18PM
Care to share why you "gave up" dual-booting on a laptop? And if you ever found a replacement situation that works for you? And what did you do that was so critical that you had to switch OS's immediately and couldn't wait the 60 or so seconds to shut down and reboot? Not trying to be a smartass, genuinely curious.
Sure, rebooting is inconvenient, but it beats the hell out of lugging around 2 devices or having to restart your work after your VM bugs out because it can't handle your high-performance Windows software.
Hell, I dual-booted on my ancient Dell laptop (Windows for pirated^W audio recording software and soft synths, Linux for everything else) and encountered no complications right up until the laptop died.
(Score: 2, Informative) by dast on Friday March 14 2014, @02:28PM
I think he did say why. VMWare. Windows XP and 7 both run pretty well under a Linux host OS. I was able to ditch my Windows partition on my development workstation, even though I was contracting for a client who worked only in Windows (embedded work with Windows Mobile). I actually used VirtualBox, as it supported all of the various, esoteric hardware I had to use. It was a beautiful setup. No need to dual boot anymore...
(Score: 2) by snick on Friday March 14 2014, @04:42PM
The fact that _all_ solutions for cross filesystem access drooled on themselves as soon as I had to deal with files larger than 2G.
Right now I'm running a Mac with a Windows 8 VM that has access to the host FS (don't ask)
Switching OS is a simple matter of switching in and out of the VM, so when tasks come up where I have to be here or there I can go back and forth in a second. And yeah I know that this loads my box more heavily than dual boot, but the time it saves over the lifetime of the laptop justifies the cost of the beefier system needed to support it.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Friday March 14 2014, @02:27PM
I read another comment on some site that I agree with, It's probably so MS can count phones that have Android, as a dual boot option, as Win phones to boost their adoption numbers. Basically it's like selling PCs with windows pre-installed, you count it as a windows sale whether the user goes home and immediately formats it or not.
Basically, it'll look better on their quarterly report and make them feel like they're winning a losing battle.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 1) by dast on Friday March 14 2014, @02:33PM
The only reason I could see having a dual boot phone with Windows would be if my employer only supported Win Mobile phones on their infrastructure, but I wanted to use Android at home. At that point though, I'd just carry two phones. Why infect a perfectly good android phone with Win Mobile?
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Friday March 14 2014, @02:42PM
Blackberry already has that functionality for the enterprise BYOD space. I know BB isn't doing well lately, but to my knowledge they're still top dog for Government and Business because of that.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 14 2014, @02:48PM
Agreed, the disruption of dual boot on a computer is just too much of a pain in the rear to deal with.
Anyone who says they do this routinely is either new to it, and still wowed by the novelty, or just plain delusional.
If you don't boot into each OS frequently, you spend the first 20 minutes applying patches, then another 5 rebooting.
If you frequently NEED switch back and forth you end up needing things that are on the other OS. Shut down, reboot, rinse repeat.
That gets to be so frequent you end up mounting windows partitions under Linux, only to find the
you've corrupted the file system, or created incompatible files.
You never know where you mail is, unless you use web mail or an IMAP server.
Your partitioning scheme quickly reveals itself to have been a bad choice.
Any though of backup goes out the window, because you now need to do it twice.
Then you find out that one OS nukes the other upon install.
Then Microsoft becomes so alarmed at dual booting that they invent UEFI simply to make it harder, and you can scarcely find a machine without it.
As soon as Virtual Machine technology became viable every intelligent person dumped dual boot, and installed their secondary OS in a virtual machine. The smart ones boot into Linux, and add windows as a VM, and run Samba on the Linux side to provide disk storage for bulk file storage to the windows virtual machine, making those files safely available in both host and guest.
One click launches the secondary OS in a window, while you continue to work in the host OS.
The only down side of VM technology, is how seductive it is.
Pretty soon, you find yourself installing OpenBSD in another VM, maybe a couple other Linux distros, and pretty soon you figure out you've learned a whole lot in a painless way, and never put your machine at risk.
And backup of a VM happens like every other file.
THAT BEING SAID: Dual boot might actually work on a phone.
But why? If your employer wants you to have a phone on their network, have them buy you one.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 14 2014, @04:20PM
I have a triple-boot Windows 7, XP, and Xubuntu setup. I keep the majority of my files that I want to get at on an NTFS partition. This works perfectly fine and without corruption (well, except for line endings, obviously, but just open the file in Wordpad and save.) The closest I've come to FS corruption is when I occasionally resize a Windows partition or the big NTFS file store partition, then the next time I boot Windows, it runs the CHKDSK equivalent on the part and says everything's fine.
Well...it depends. Your first time or two, yeah, probably. I have a setup I'm satisfied with, although I'll admit it's a wee bit convoluted. There's supposedly ext3 (and reiser?) drivers for Windows, but I found the easier way is to put any data I want to get at from both systems on NTFS. For any partitions I don't *want* Windows to see (the Linux install), I use whatever Linux filesystem as applicable.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this...with the right FS types (as above) I don't see why it would be a problem.
Windows nukes the MBR, sure. And GRUB2 is a lot harder to fix that with than legacy GRUB, sadly. So you just make sure to install the Linux system last, or dd the MBR somewhere and restore it after the Windows install via live CD. But other than that, there shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't say to use the entire disk during the install procedure, even for Windows.
Although granted, I would never recommend a newbie try setting up a dual boot on their own. That's just a recipe for disaster, but after my first 2 or 3 times I haven't had much trouble.
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 14 2014, @04:25PM
Rather needlessly confrontational and dismissive. I've been dual*-booting since 2008 or so, and the novelty has mostly worn off; now I like having a stable system I can configure how I want. Unfortunately, the classic reasons apply:
1) I have a few productive programs, and a number of games, that I can only run properly in Windows.
2) Windows is insane (interface-wise) lately so for everything other than the aforementioned programs, I boot Linux.
And I REALLY don't feel like trying to run Civ IV in VirtualBox...my box is hardly beefy to begin with :)
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 14 2014, @05:57PM
True enough. My bad. I could have worded it better.
Still, your post [dev.soylentnews.org] above the parent is a classic case of "Thanks for Proving My Point":
Priceless! ;-)
Its clear you do it because you can, not because you need to, and not because its efficient, or even practical. Same reason I run my own mail server, DNS server, FTP server, time server, etc. Its ok for me, but I wouldn't suggest it to anyone I want to remain friends with.
And if you game a lot, when using Virtual Machines, you are well advised to choose your Host machine OS based on your gaming needs. Having said that, With VMware Workstation (not player), I can open a windows VM under my Linux Host, pop it into exclusive mode and still be competitive at some first person shooters. (Pro tip: bridge your nick - never nat, and buy some ram).
But for the average person with a typical need of a second OS, (Windows or Linux), a Virtual machine is the easiest, safest, and most trouble free way to go, because as the replies to this thread have indicated getting Dual Boot to work is a never ending PITA, and breakage is right around the corner.
Also, for mounting NTFS partitions in Linux, MOST of the problems have been solved and its ALMOST safe to do so, even read-write.
But for years I have been using Paragon [paragon-software.com] (free version) which allows me to do this when necessary (rare), usually to work with an external disks shared with windows machines.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2) by snick on Friday March 14 2014, @04:50PM
Once upon a time I had a dual boot linux windows system where I cross mounted the file systems, and configured it so that I could launch the Windows partition under VMWare when linux was running. (required 2 Windows HW configurations: 1 for booting the native to Windows and 1 for booting it under VMWare)
It was fiddley as all hell, but it actually did work. I just had to remember to unmount the windows partition from the filesystem before booting it as a VM or hilarity would ensue.
I probably threw away as much time setting that up and walking the tightrope as I did fooling with wine.
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Friday March 14 2014, @08:48PM
Anyone who says they do this routinely is either new to it, and still wowed by the novelty, or just plain delusional.
Or they have some hardware-related reason for doing it. For instance, I set up a Linux/Win7 dual boot machine for working with National Instruments data acquisition cards on Windows. When I'm not doing that stuff I'm in Linux.
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Saturday March 15 2014, @12:38AM
Well, last time I heard of someone doing that [umpcportal.com], the device didn't burst into flames. Of course, it was an N800, not a phone.
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