Ubuntu and WinXp can be friends

One week of friendship between my Ubunutu 9.04 and Windows XP passed.
What can I say ? It can be real.
My computer with Core 2 Duo processor and 3Gb RAM on board have host OS Ubuntu system installed.
VirtualBox from Sun used for virtualization of Windows XP

Coming back to my Windows Only days there were 3 partitions on a single HDD
C:/ - windows installation
X:/ - Server (all working files are placed)
M:/ - media (docs, music other)
and one more for Linux root
/ - Linux Ext3 fs

My first step was migrations of X and M from NTFS to FAT32. Just because it is easier to mount FAT32 than NTFS in Linux-based systems

Next VirtualBox was installed and 8Gb virtual hard drive was created on Linux / root partition to install Windows XP

Then C:/ partition was shorten in a size of X:/ to find place for one more partition called VM_X That is because it is not good idea to mount X:/ directly to virtual machine through Ubuntu, also named as folder sharing. X:/ used heavy and sharing it can potential cause performance leak.

Logical Volume Management v2 was used to manage VM_X partition.

• To create physical LVM volume use pvcreate
• To create group LVM volume use vgcreate
• To create logical LVM volume use lvcreate

I liked LVM2 a lot. If virtual HDD VM_X hard drive will fulfill all VM_X partition it will be possible to add more physical LVM volumes to volume group and increase logical volume dynamicaly

• To add more PV to VG use vgextend
• To extend LV use lvextend
• Resize ext2/ext3 file system with resize2fs
  

Use LVM HOW-TO for more details

M:/ partition is shared with VirtualBox to WinXP as it is. Just use f.e
net use m: //vboxsrv/m in Windows console

With two monitors using both Linux and Windows is quick reliable. Linux on one monitor and Windows on another - cool isn't it ))
Now I can use Windows OS for my job staff and all benefits of OpenSource wold with Linux OS


Some LVM Tips:

Adding Logical volume to Volume Group to fullfill free space
sudo lvcreate -l 200 %FREE -nLVNAME VGNAME

Some File system Tips:

To specify custom label
man mkfs.ext2
See -L option

To set user permissions after mount
Just use sudo chmod 777 -R /media/mountpoint
Will keep active after reboot