With the time spent with the family, and not having my own computer with me right now, I've been away from linux hacking for almost three weeks. I hadn't given it much though until now, but after joining Sabayon's group on facebook, I remembered how much I like it, and I remembered that I kinda miss fooling around the system, and I miss having a REAL development environment with my favorite tools to work with. So, I decided to install Sabayon linux on this computer, replacing the old debian install I had on this disk that hasn't been used in months. The reason I still have it here is that grub is managing the booting of the operating systems, and I don't have the time to work around it, leaving only windows installed, since formating isn't an option at this time. Too much crap to back-up manually from inside windows, too little time to do it properly.
So I was thinking about what I needed, and how I could get it, while browsing through old drafts, when I found a tutorial I had written a long time ago and never posted, when I decided that maybe I can install what I want, fix it all up and post how to do it. Maybe I can get some experience points in tutorial writing.
Can't really post a step-by-step instruction set right now since Sabayon is still downloading, but I can describe the problem at hand.
Now, the first issue is that windows can't break during the process or hell will be raised and I'll sleep on the couch (kidding, I hope). So windows has to be able to boot, and needs access to everything on it's own partition plus everything on a second partition that will be used for sharing files between both operating systems. The old partition scheme is going to be reused, but the filesystems need changing, since the sharing partition is a FAT32 partition (don't ask me why, 'cause I have no clue). That one needs to become an NTFS filesystem. The windows one will remain untouched, as will the swap partition. However, the boot partition needs to be resized and changed to ext3 (why? Because I want to.) That leaves the root partition for sabayon and new partition for home, because of the extra safety it ensures that if I have to do something to the root or if I feel like changing distro, I can keep my personal files safely stored and untouched.
So, here we go, this is the intro post for an upcoming tutorial(s). I plan to make Sabayon become as user friendly to my girlfriend as I can, but still providing her with all her favorite applications, which means that I'll have to setup some windows applications under wine (Sims 3 comes to mind), meaning that I can give some pointers to anybody interested along the way. Just a way to give a bit back to the world and to ease the load on other members of the linux community. So, long story put short, I'll be sharing a bit of knowledge and a few linux recipes over the next weeks, so feel free to use them.