So, work gave me a nice laptop to play with (er, 'develop on'). TBD if I get to keep it, but I want to use it as my primary machine. Which in turn means I'm going to do a mildly complex setup.

Spec:
Dell Precison M4300
2GB RAM, 2.2GHz Centrino T7500 dual-core CPU, 160GB HD, NVidia Quadro FX 360M

Partitions:
* Dell recovery / diagnostics
* Vista 64-bit (30 GB)
* Kubuntu 7.10 32-bit (30 GB)
* NTFS shared space (88GB)
- w/ file-hosted TrueCrypt volume(s) for all sensitive/personal data
* FAT32 shared swap (4GB)

I tried installing Kubuntu 64-bit, but... it's a major pain in the ass. NVidia drivers don't work right at all; I get blank screens w/ X even in the installer. And from googling it, the performance improvement is minimal if any, and the pain of getting stuff to work right is significantly higher. So, screw it, I'll stick with 32-bit.

I'm going to just copy the files back onto my kubuntu part that I had on it prior to moving it off pre-Vista-install. Then mess with Grub & BCD so I can get a single boot screen, and get Vista & Kubuntu to just use the new FAT32 swap. This'll require some initrd hackery in linux - meh again.

I was considering trying to run it w/ Xen or VMware, but it seems like that'd be too limiting - e.g. I wouldn't be able to run games under Windows. And I was considering trying to get OSX on as well, but again the support for that seems pretty bad - not good enough for me wanting to just have it *work* once set up.

As for file-hosted truecrypt under a journaled, swapped system... it's a pretty minor security problem given my usage AFAICT. Just need to make sure I don't have reason to change the password.

Going down for reinstall of Ubuntu now.


ETA 1AM: Finally got grub fixed. Windows CD is useless for recovery even compared to what I can get from initramfs, let alone the kubuntu live DVD. Hmph.

Anyway, it's mostly set up & working now. Still need to set up kubuntu to pretend the fat32 part is swap.

Vista actually has a (mostly) working version of symoblic links, yay - mklink. So I've symlinked my data directories on the shared part. Still need to make the crypto volumes for cryptoshare and set up cross-os-compatible settings symlinking (eg for firefox). That'll be 'fun'. :)


ETA 3AM: TrueCrypt BSODs. Grr.

ETA 4AM: Evidently it's a weird interaction between TrueCrypt and the EXT2/3 IFS driver. Gah.