It should be noted that i’m an OS agnostic. I believe the right OS, and the right platform, for any job depends on what job needs to be done and by whom it needs to be done. Thus, at home, at my spare time, and whenever i write on my thesis, my platform of choice is Linux and i would not dare to have my mother use anything else than Mac OSX (and there is no such thing as a command line or anything complicated on OSX, alright?)

My new job is a Windows shop. It makes total sense is a business environment; MS makes software that can be integrated in really spiffy ways (something KDE eventually will catch up with ;). However, i’d still like to have a laptop that can dual boot into Linux at times. But what to do, my bright and shiny work tool comes with a single, fully populated 100 GB partition (plus a “hidden” service partition, but that’s another story). How can i install Linux when there is no space for it — without re-installing Windows, or paying for a Partition Magic license?

Easily.

The tool for the job is called gparted, short for Gnome partition editor. Gparted can do a lot of fun things, and one of them is to safely resize an NTFS partition (despite what you might have heard about Linux being unable to reliably write to NTFS). And here comes the spiffy part. Gparted can install as a “live” Linux distribution, on a USB flash memory thingy.

Here’s how. Install gparted LiveUSB on a USB memory stick. Boot your Windows box from it. Select the Windows partition, click the “resize” button, make space for a Linux distro (i gave it 20G of the 100G disc). Let gparted do its magic. Reboot Windows (this will run MS chkdsk). Install Linux. Whoa.

Installing Kubuntu on my rather piffy laptop took less than ten minutes, including booting from the installation/live CD and doing some eye candy customization. Kubuntu did most of the configuration, like that goofy display. The only things i really needed to tell it was where i am, what keyboard layout i have (when is that going to be automated?), my username & password and the name of the laptop. That’s it.

Man i love an easy OS.

Two more things i just might install, and both are file systems: 1. sshfs to mount a directory over ssh for painless backups of thesis and equally painless access to my music files (another idea: rsync.net at US$1.80/GB/mo). 2. flickrfs to manage my flickr photos just like they were in a local directory. Unsane.

Update: Oddly enough, flickrfs worked the first time i tried it and sshfs did not. Instructions said i should log out (to acivvate group settings used for fusermount). After logging in again, sshfs works wonders and flickrfs has stopped working. Oh well.