Boot2Win

A desktop entry that boots you into Windows from your Linux desktop

Setup

This guide will help you getting Boot2Win setup. First of all, make sure you have Windows installed. Install your favourite GNU/Linux operating system with the GRUB bootloader afterwards.

Setting up GRUB

Make sure Windows is your second entry in the GRUB bootloader menu. If you have two operating systems installed, this often is already the case. While booted into Linux, install gedit from your software repository (you may also use another text editor, but in here we'll use gedit). After that is done, open up the terminal and use the following command.

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Search for the line GRUB_DEFAULT=0 and modify it to GRUB_DEFAULT=saved. You may also want to disable the timeout in the GRUB menu by modifying the line GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 (or any other number than 10) to 0.0001 (as some distributions refuse to set it to 0, defaulting to a a much higher number than 0). To apply your changes, save the file and use the following command in the terminal:

sudo update-grub

On Fedora, you may want to use one the following command instead (UEFI only):

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

On Fedora systems that don't use UEFI:

grub2-mkconfig -o "$(readlink -e /etc/grub2.conf)"

Placing the desktop entry

Now, download the Boot2Win desktop entry designated for your Linux distro from this repository. Rebooting into Windows requires your administrator password, which means you need to open up the file in a text editor and replace every instance of PASSWORD_HERE with your actual administrator password (unless you have chosen to use the passwordless version of Boot2Win, in which case you will be asked for a password each time you want to reboot). After that, move the file to ~/.local/share/applications. Please note that desktop entries marked with WIP do not work in their current state and are still being worked on.

Congratulations!

You have now completed the installation. To boot into Windows from your Linux installation, launch the desktop entry.

License

This project uses the GNU General Public License v3.0. A copy of this license can be found in the repository.