partition management in dual-boot laptop / limited space

[Jon LaBadie]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2016 at 06:23:55PM +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 6 January 2016 at 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
> >> Is there any less drastic approach?
> >
> > You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the
> > occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high-
> > performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For
> > most everything else it's fine.
> >
> 
> This is probably better now than it was before, but with a two core
> system and not a massive amount of RAM it seems a better use to dual
> boot on the laptop (and on my desktop I dual boot because that's
> exactly what I use windows for). Allowing access to the shared
> partition (music and other data) means I can get at that from both
> sides of a dual boot, I can install windows programs there if
> necessary to avoid having a large chunk of space stuck in a c:\
> partition or VM image. That would be a bit harder from a VM (if
> possible at all, not sure filesystem passthrough will work for a
> windows client, samba is awful). Also, my windows license is a
> hardware one, not for VM. I can only see the windows in a vm helping
> in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent
> access to a filesystem on the host machine.

To the latter point, I run Windows 8.1 as a VirtualBox VM under F22.
The space for all my VM's is in a single LV with a ext4 filesystem.
It can be resized as needed.

I don't know about other virtual environments, but under VBox, access
to the Linux data is simple, called shared folders.  Normally I make
my F22 home dir available as a share (e: drive).  This is one directory
tree on an ext4 fs in an LV.

To try other combos today I shared /usr/local, the root of an ext4
fs again in an LV.  I also shared /tmp, a memory based tempfs.
Again, a simple "fill out a gui form of 5 items".

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jonfu at jgcomp.com