IT must be possible, I’ve read it is with various other versions of *nix, so let’s have a crack.  Here’s the ideal:

XP Pro

Vista Business

Kubuntu 8.04.1

On my laptop, XP Pro and Vista Business have quite happily co-existed.  The main reason for this was because I was quiet an early adopter of Vista I didn’t (couldnt) just chuck away XP yet.  Also I needed 2 vpn clients that couldn’t co-exist on the same build (Cisco client and Safenet).

Now I want to chuck a 3rd item into the mix – Kubuntu.  Currently it is installing, having resized the last partition down to create space.

The laptop is a Compaq nx8220

It ran through the installer for kubuntu OK, on the first boot under Other OS we get:

Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)

Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)

Obvious what has happened here with 2 duplicate entries – to get XP & Vista to dual boot (XP instlled first), you have to load the Vista boot loader onto the XP partition. So we are seeing 2 lots of the Vista boot loader so it assumes we have 2 different Vistas.  Hmm, really the first one is XP and the second is Vista.

Selecting the first one takes us to the Windows Boot Manager where we can then choose Earlier Version of Windows (i.e. XP) or Vista.  This is how it was setup before you would boot straight to this menu.  Rebooting here and then selecting the 2nd Windows Vista/Longhorn then takes you to…the same Windows Boot Manager but this time Vista is the default option with XP the second.

Rebooting then finally selecting Ubuntu 8.04.1 for our first boot successfully boots to the login screen.  Logging in produces annoying chimes, I hate annoying chimes on any OS.

A quick cat of /boot/grub/menu.lst reveals our entries, changing the Vista/Longhorn entry to XP makes things a little clearer for future use.

Well, it certainly looks like we’ve found most of the hardware 🙂  No FF though as standard..