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Neil Bothwick is proud to be the longestserving Linux Format writer!

For our 300th issue, we thought we would round up some of the more common problems we’ve dealt with over the years. We considered making a league table about the most frequently encountered issues, but realised we’d be answering questions about GRUB, GRUB, GRUB, CUPS and GRUB. Instead, here are five of the most popular and interesting topics…

Q Pick an OS

We receive a lot of questions about dual booting. That is, running Windows and Linux on the same computer. There are two main issues. The first is having the two (or more if you have multiple distros installed) operating systems available and choosing which to boot. The second is accessing the data from one system when using the other.

A Choosing which OS to boot is handled by the bootloader, usually GRUB. If you reinstall Windows at any point, it usually overwrites your existing bootloader. To restore it, you need to boot a Linux live distro to run the relevant commands. The simplest way to do this is to get hold of a copy of Rescatux (www. supergrubdisk.org/rescatux), copy it to a USB stick, either with Etcher or plain old dd, and boot from it. Rescatux, as you may have guessed from the name, is a rescue distro. This one is different in that it has a GUI to perform a number of the most common repairs, including filesystem and bootloader issues. This way, you can restore your Linux bootloader with a couple of mouse clicks. Because of the way Windows takes over the bootloader as though it were the only operating system in existence, when setting up a dual boot system from scratch, it is best to install Windows first and then your chosen Linux distro.

The other part of running a dual boot system is sharing data between the two operating systems. Linux supports a wide variety of filesystems, including the main Windows ones. Windows does have a driver for ext2 but it is generally best to use a Windows filesystem for shared partitions. You have the choice of FAT, which has been supported for ever, but has limits on the size of files and filesystems – 4GB was a lot when FAT was conceived. NTFS is now well supported in Linux. The in-kernel driver is limited; the ntfs-3g driver is a better choice, although you may have to install it from your distro’s package manager.