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Posted on 29th August 2024 |
Show only this post Show all posts in this thread (Software). |
This article on Ars Technica reports on problems encountered by some Linux users, caused by a recent update issued by Microsoft. Typically for Microsoft, the problematic patch is meant to fix a high severity vulnerability that has been known about for 2 years, which MS has only just now addressed. The update makes changes to GRUB, which is the boot loader used by Linux, and by dual-boot (Linux and Windows) systems, so the problems are only being experienced by users with a dual-boot set-up on their PCs. Such problems are one of the reasons why I don't use dual-boot. I am not saying that the GRUB vulnerability didn't need fixing; it did, two years ago (by someone on the Linux side - I am not sure why this didn't happen)! Also, GRUB is not a piece of MS software, so it is rather cheeky of MS to patch it, and outrageous for them to break it with their patch. I experimented with dual-boot when I first started using Linux, but quickly changed to using virtual machines (VMs). Most power users of computers have good reasons to want to use both Windows and Linux. In my case these reasons include:
There are several tools for running VMs:
Here are some of my pages about virtualisation: If you want to try out virtual machines, I would very strongly recommend running them on a Linux host (Ubuntu is probably the safest and easiest; when installing Linux remember to create a swap partition), not on a Windows host. Technically, it is possible to turn an existing Windows installation into a virtual machine disc image, but I have never managed to make this work, so you will probably want a Windows installation disc. Check out the "How To Virtualise" guide above, plus there is lots of help available online. |