dual-booting

Computer time: Windows against the rest of the world

I am not sure, but Windows seems to be the only operating system, that wants the computer clock to be set to the local time zone instead of universal standard time (UTC). Maybe that is a relic of the times when Microsoft thought that the internet was not very important for the future of computing. All other operating systems apparently use UTC: MacOS, Android, Linux, BSD, ... However, if you are dual-booting your computer, you can get into trouble. Not all operating systems detect automatically a dual boot install and adjust their behaviour in order to be compatible with Windows.

BSD and Linux

I am used to the fact that a Linux installer honours a pre-existing install of Windows and offers to setup the computer with a dual-boot option during installation. Vice-versa no Windows installer honours any other pre-exisiting OS. Therefore I was surprised that when I tried to install Ubuntu 16.04 on my PFSense box (FreeBSD), the Ubuntu installer did not even see that a BSD install exists on the drive. I chose the "erase all" option, but when I rebooted after the installer has finished, the system went straight into PFSense without giving me any option to select Ubuntu.