Give that man a cigar! You’ve cut right to the chase, Mr. Pancakes. 
Optimal?
Hardly; it suites me.
Which, is all it needs to do. I don’t run my system to suite others, only me.
@Writer’s Block
Off topic but your latest Aston Martin project looks absolutely stunning! Can’t wait to see the finished results.
Yeah, I think peeps are making this overly complicated. Just install Ubuntu on that second drive and it will give you a grub to choose what OS to boot. You will love Linux. It’s a great, stable OS and for Blender, I just download it from the Blender site, unzip it to a folder and run it (no installation needed). Works great and yes, it works perfectly from windows to Linux. Linux can see your windows drives but windows is not smart enough to see your Linux drive so you might want to keep your work on the windows drive. I use a fat32 thumb stick between my windows machine at work and my Linux machine at home and Blender has no problems finding textures.
You can run Excel and other windows apps through WINE just fine. At Dreamworks, we used MS Outlook on our Linux machines with WINE and it works perfectly.
How about Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects (CS5.5)? Any experience running them through WINE?
Photoshop works great under WINE… I use Kdenlive for editing (open source). Lightworks is the big pro package for linux (also open source). I use Nuke instead of After Effects which runs native in Linux.
Are you sure Lightworks in open source? Last I heard, they had a regular version and a pro version, the latter being a pay-by-the-month deal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a for-pay application where they give you the source. Of course, I suppose there’s always a first time.
Just curious: have you, yourself, actually run Photoshop CS 5.5 under WINE or is this something you read about somewhere?
Sorry if that sounds confrontational. In the last 28 years, I’ve been told a lot of times that a friend of a friend heard from someone online, etc. etc. only to find that my 28 years experience building and using computers, programming in over a dozen languages and doing art on every OS under the sun, even coupled with a list of cryptic instructions found at the bottom of an old hard drive hanging off a print server in the back room of an IBM lab, isn’t enough to reproduce the results so often claimed by rumours around the Internet.
I’ve installed Linux on more than two dozen computers since 1995 and always, always, scraped it off again anywhere from a week to six months later after finding that I just couldn’t be bothered to struggle up the dozens and dozens of learning curves toward being productive. I don’t like GIMP or Lightworks, so if I can’t take my Photoshop and Premiere Pro with me, I’m going to stay home… if you see what I mean.
A lot has changed in the Linux world. When I started using it for work in 2005, I hated it and couldn’t even imagine using Linux at home. Today it’s the main OS on all my computers except my game machine… and that duel boots. I’m not trying to talk anyone into it but I find it fun to use personally. I run Linux Mint 14, Ubuntu 10.10 and Joli Cloud on my netbook and love them all.
CS5 (what I use)…
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=20158
I’m not sure about Lightworks… a quick search turned up squat for Lightworks on Linux. 
I like Kdenlive because it’s simple and does what I need. I was a Premiere guy before and Kdenlive does exactly what I used to do with Premeire (but I’m a fairly light user).
I went the http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/windows-installer route. I installed it on my laptop who’s hard drive has a blank 129gb partition. I installed Linux onto this partition and so far so good. I’ll play around with my laptop for a gew days and if no major issues arise I’ll load it onto my PC.
Exciting few days ahead 
Now I have a wonderfull picture in my head
This is to be a duel to the death. Stan you get to choose the weapon…
Stan points to a pair of old gumboots.
Also Lightworks for Linux I think is in the closed beta stage IIRC
@tommywright: Thanks for the info. The part that makes me skittish is “What works: almost all functions” and “Bridge: after disabling some options” and “it is slow” (their emphasis).
I look at this and think about how in my current set-up on Windows 7 x64 I’m working merrily along with Photoshop at its fastest possible speed (although I find it strange that when I switched from Photoshop Elements to CS 5.5 Extended it actually seems to be slower), I don’t have to figure out which options to disable in Bridge and I have access to all functions.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
And a lot of things may have changed in Linux, but multiple-drive systems are not for the faint of heart, especially with a dual boot thrown in. I tried Mint last summer and got absolutely nothing done for two weeks while I fiddled with trying to get the boot record on the same drive with the two OSs (Win7 and Linux), tried to get a fully-working version of GIMP installed, and tried (in vane, I might add) to get my EMU 0404 sound card working (even thought it’s supported).
For some as-yet unknown reason, I couldn’t install from my DVD drive, only from a USB stick and even that was dicey.
And as I mentioned, I’m no stranger to UNIX-like operating systems. I kept a FreeBSD LAN/Internet server running for over ten years while waiting for Windows software and hardware to catch up with what I could do on my Amiga way back in the 1980’s. I hated Windows for years and years because it couldn’t do what I was used to on my Amiga, hated Apple for being too damn expensive and hated Commodore for dying and leaving me high and dry.
But, I’m over that now and as much as I’d still like to hate Windows, it’s what I know and understand. Besides that, it does everything I need it to do and when it doesn’t, I know how to beat it into submission.
Anyway, I realize you aren’t trying to talk me into anything, so take all that with a healthy dose of salt (as opposed to a single grain).
Question, the performance of Ubuntu on my laptop isn’t great. It constantly hangs up for a few seconds when navigating, browsing and ect…
Laptop specs are: Duo T5550, 3GB Memory and GeForce 9500m GS GPU. Is the lack of performance due to the weak hardware of the laptop or because I installed it on a drive that was formatted to NTFS in windows?
I should note that using the windows installer did not re-format the drive I installed Ubuntu on. It simply created a Ubuntu folder on this drive and installed it. Windows can see and explore this Ubuntu folder.
So maybe this windows installer is a way to do a quick install of ubuntu that’s more user friendly by creating the dual boot but at the cost of performance.
It’s possible it’s because there’s still a Windows partition on your drive. What happens is this: when you use a Windows-based Linux installer, it puts Linux on the second partition. You already know that part, but…
The first partition, where Windows still takes up space, is near the inner part of the drive disk(s) which means faster access. Linux is on the outer part of the drive which has, you guessed it, slower access.
Also, most of not all laptops use 5400 rpm drives which are a fair bit slower than those typically found in desktops (7200 rpm). I’m not sure you can even get a 7200 rpm drive that fill fit into a laptop, but even if you could, the extra heat generated might be too much for the laptop to handle.
If it’s a major problem and you have some money to throw at it, you might consider doing some research into SSD drives.
Thank you. And I’m getting there.
You’d probably get a little boost in speed installing it to it’s own Ext4 drive rather than NTFS, but you shouldn’t be getting pauses with what you have either. Did you install the proprietary Nvidia drivers? Ubuntu ships with Nouveau drivers (Open Source drivers), which tend to not even have half the performance. Here is a video of 9 things to do after installing it:
Another alternative would be trying something like Xubuntu - it’s Ubuntu but with a different desktop called XFCE that is a lot lighter, at the expense of not being as flashy.
This is a bad idea. It works, but it’s a bad idea. Clear out files you want to keep from a partition, and then boot from an install CD / thumb drive to format that partition to ext4 before installing linux to it.
@FishB8
Yeah that’s what I’m doing now. But, my laptop is old and doesn’t support USB boot and it’s CD drive appears to be failing. The install fails about 90% in. I’m trying a different CD now, hoping that it’s maybe just a bad burn.
It worked! Turns out it was a bad CD, I burned a new one, setup proper root and swap partitions and man oh man, ubuntu is slicker then snot 
Now to play around with it on this laptop for a few days and then, this weekend I’m installing it on my beastly desktop.
Haha, I know how u feel, same situation was here also with Mint, days to get dual boot that works. Every time just Win7 booted, no sign of Linux mint, not even text during boot. Nice text there Mint installation, Install Linux Mint alongside Windows 7 and then come window where u can change the size of partition but it didnt tell which side, left or right, Mint will install.
And Installer didnt tell that if u have Nvidia-card…
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair
sudo boot-repair
and sometimes during that sudo process…“open new terminal and copy paste this to there”
Yes, its so easy to install Linux even my grandma can do that !
Ugh, this is maddening! I decided to install Ubuntu on my PC so here are the steps I took.
- Hooked up NTFS formatted 250GB drive (henceforth shall be know as my “Linux Drive”) in windows and deleted the volume via the admin tools to remove the NTFS format.
- Rebooted and went into bios where I set my 1st boot to my optical drive and 2nd boot priority to my now empty Linux drive.
- After rebooting, the install CD kicked and I selected Something Else and partitioned the now free Linux drive too: 233,000mb size primary, ext-4, mount / (root partition) and 17,500mb size swap partition.
- Ubuntu installed without errors and asked to reboot (So far the process was exactly the same as I used on my laptop which works perfect. But, on my laptop I have one drive partitioned into two parts. Part 1 has W7 and Part 2 has Linux. On my PC I have two separate drives)
- Upon rebooting, my PC goes straight into W7 like nothing has changed.
Now I went into the BIOS and made sure that my Linux drive is the primary boot device. I tried every boot combination I could think off, even using my BIOS direct boot feature to boot into my Linux drive (I have the Asus P8P67 Deluxe) but it pretends like the Linux drive doesn’t exist.
I even tried physically swapping my sata cables on my MB, plugging my Linux drive in where my W7 was plugged in and nothing.
Finally, I did another fresh install of Linux and when that didn’t work I tried the un-install and re-install feature but my PC refuses to recognized Linux.
To make things worst, I did some testing on my laptop and Blender is significantly faster on Linux then W7. I have a short animation I want to render out in a few days and current render eta on W7 is around 100 plus hrs so I would really, really love to render it out on Linux.