on 11:38 Thu 03 Mar, Always Learning (centos at g7.u22.net) wrote: > > On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 19:18 -0800, Dr. Ed Morbius wrote: > > > It far and away already has. Dual-booting is a bastard compromise which > > forces you to select between altnernative OSs, doesn't allow for > > simultaneous access to features (and storage) of both, and generally > > necessitates use of some low-standard transfer storage partition (e.g.: > > vfat). > > My dual-booting, actually tri-booting, with Vista (ugh!), Centos > (brilliant) and Fedora 14 (not keen and a bit seriously buggy) allows me > in Linux to access and change the file space content used by the other > two operating systems. Surely that constitutes simultaneous access to > storage? I should have hedged: there are means of accessing NTFS from Linux (ntfs-ng drivers) and Linux ext2/3 filesystems from Windows (explorE2fs and some ported drivers, IIRC). As I recall, writing via ntfs-ng still triggers a filesystem scan on the next Windows boot. The ext2/3 access last I used it (years ago) worked, but wasn't particularly fluid. Neither gives you proper multi-user semantics (/etc/passwd and wherever NT stores its user perms/IDs stuff aren't used). If you've coordinated UIDs, yes, it's very possible to share Linux partitions between multi-booted systems, though I'd still argue that this is less than optimal. A chroot works pretty well (and keeps things like LD search paths sane). KVM is /very/ lightweight and allows for separate process space. Compare against CIFS/Samba shares or NFS exports bewteen booted host/guests. You get native filesystem support (under the host/guest as relevant), and mappings via CIFS/Samba and/or NFS/NIS+. The win is still virtualization. -- Dr. Ed Morbius, Chief Scientist / | Robot Wrangler / Staff Psychologist | When you seek unlimited power Krell Power Systems Unlimited | Go to Krell!