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Micro$traw on the Camel's Back: My forays into Linux
03-09-2014, 08:38 AM
Okay. I've been patient with Windows 8.1 after a catastrophic HD failure and inability to find my Windows 7 installer... until I'd forked over the bills for the disc, etc etc...
And apparently MikeyShaft doesn't like folks building their own computers or daring to "upgrade" without being a bleeding edge OEM consumer.
My drivers are a mess because apparently Plug-and-play is no longer a thing: anything that depended on MS drivers is pretty much dead in the water, like a MIDI Keyboard Controller, to try to do some electronic music, for example.
Thus, as soon as I get an extra HD RAID'ed into my box, I'm Dual booting Ubuntu Studio 14.xx. Sunk cost fallacy and all, I've got too many things I've heard don't play well with WINE that do work on Win 8.1...
So. Yeah.
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The Kernel for 8.1 broke a lot of surprising things. I built a system yesterday and it booted fine, right up until I tried to upgrade to Windows 8.1 . Hardware driver errors kept causing it to BSOD and reset itself.... And this was new, out of the box hardware, with the drivers installed off the disk it came with.
I really should've Linuxed it like I planned to, but I got 8(not 8.1)Pro cheap , and it has a few features that are handy for what I wanted to do with the new system.
I would say that you shouldn't rely on RAID - it's really a false security. It's really only good if one of the disks goes POP! suddenly and just drops straight out of the array. If it doesn't, if it fails but hangs in there still 'operational' but dying, then it's going to spew corrupt data all over the mirror and ruin everything. Having had this happen to the system that contained the entire accounts of the company I used to work for when a RAID'd drive failed overnight I know from experience that the results can be horrific. Worse - it failed when I was out of the country - and was a big contributor to the Business' decision to call it a day at the end of December.
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GRARGH. HDD on my main laptop (with all my recent stuff on it, including vital emails) just went *pif*. DiskWarrior refuses to touch it. Hoping the freezer trick works....
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Fortunately, my inexperience has yet to kill me. But I couldn't install Linux just yet. I need to pore over the esoteric tomes of Disk Partitioning.
Someone led me astray on the whole "Add another HDD, it's easier to "dual boot" that way!" As in, I needed to Partition the new HD and had no idea what I was doing.
Fortunately the folks who make the Distro I was trying are kind enough to let you NOT screw things up royally if you have any degree of caution.
Another try in the Morning.
Edit:
Discovered that the manufacturer of my Net Access Device is deliberately shafting Linux as well, so I'm in the market for a new one soonish. Ah Well.
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Okay, as someone who's done dual boots (Ubuntu/Windows 7) and even triple boots (Ubuntu/Hackintosh/Windows 7), I feel that I am qualified to dispense some useful advice.
First, a link to Wikipedia about disk partitioning, just in case you need help with the terminology and such. I know I do now and then, and I've done stuff with my computers that make most casual users boggle.
Next, get yourself a live-cd version of GParted. This software is so freaking useful that you'll smack yourself for not trying it sooner (if you haven't, that is).
Got it? Good. Burn that sucker to a CD, back up your important bits, then nuke the drive. The best way to do this is with a clean slate.
Now! The partitions!
- You will want a nice little Primary Partition, about a gig or so, to use as your boot partition. In Ubuntu-Linux, this is where you will mount /boot and, subsequently, install GRUB. That will come later, though.
- Create two Extended Partitions - these will be for your respective OSes as they will require additional partitions for file swap space and you can only have four real partitions.
- Create a final Primary Partition to use for document storage. Fat32 is a good file system to use for this as it can be accessed by both Windows and Linux and therefore effectively act as a neutral ground between the two operating systems. However, if you're going to have files larger than 4 gigs, then you may as well just make it NTFS instead. Linux at least reads and writes to NTFS well enough.
- In one of your Extended Partitions, create two Logical Partitions. This will be for your Windows OS, so format the larger one as NTFS. The other one will be for the file swap it will inevitably want - no need to format it as the installer will handle that on its own. I'll leave how big you want the partitions to be up to you, but I would go for about 80 to 120 gigs for the NTFS one. Windows is a pig when it comes to racking up data on user settings for individual programs - a nice convenience, but one you have to make accommodations for. Also, you'll want the extra space for your actual program files. For the swap space, four-to-eight gigs is good enough, unless you got ridiculous amounts of RAM, then you might want to push it to sixteen or even thirty-two gigs. Use your judgement here.
- Next, do the Extended Partition for Linux. I recommend Ext3 for your file system - it's fairly reliable and well proven thus far. I also recommend about sixty-to-eighty gigs for your Linux file system. While Linux is much better about not being a pig in general, it's also not very good about cleaning up files you no longer need. (Prime Example: older Linux kernels as you run through the updates - make sure you clean those out on a regular basis, but keep the last stable-running kernel around just in case. PS: GRUB is pretty bad about this, too.) It also gives you room to work with as you try out the myriad of open source software that is available for Linux. Have fun with that, BTW. Also, same rules for the Windows swap file space applies to the Linux swap file space.
Okay, so now that that's all out of the way, we can get to the real fun stuff! (Re)Installing your Operating Systems!
- First of all, to help maintain your sanity, it helps to install Windows first. Windows is awfully greedy when it comes to the MBR, and anytime you reinstall Windows you'll have to go through the whole rigmarole of wresting boot control from your Windows partition back into your GRUB partition. Just make sure you're putting Windows into the correct partition, otherwise things will get messy very fast.
- Now, install Ubuntu. Same rules above apply, but because the folks at Canonical have made their installer so user friendly, it's also that much easier to screw up. Do not let the installer attempt to reformat the drive. This will undo all your hard work from earlier as it will erase all your partitions. Instead, go for the option that will allow you to set the partitions up yourself, but don't change anything. Just okay it as is, then select the correct partition you want Ubuntu to go into.
- And now the most involving part of the game: Building the Goram House! For Windows, they actually did something right by allowing you to set whatever folder you choose as your library folder. For example, if you want to have all your video files get saved to a specific folder on your documents partition, then you just right-click on the Video library, hit properties, add the folder you want to the list (and remove the ones you don't want) and make sure you tag your main folder as your default save folder. In Linux... *Sighs* Unfortunately, they haven't figured out a way to let you mount any of your doc-folders in anything other than a Linux file system (ie, Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4). Which means that NTFS and FAT32 are right out (I could be wrong about FAT32, though). You'll just have to bite the bullet here and manually redirect everything every time you save.
And that's pretty much it. The pros of a setup like this is that it's a very hardy system. Short of a physical drive failure, it will keep your documents safe from even some of the nastier bugs out there (most will only target the OS and nothing else). Of course, it also helps when you get one of those bad driver updates that rapes your system and the only way to fix it is to nuke the partition and start over again. At least, this way, it only affects the one partition and leaves your boot partition alone (thus allowing you to boot into your other, still functional OS).
The cons... well... just the work that goes into setting it all up. That, and the fact all your eggs are literally in one basket should a drive failure occur and you were only using one drive.
That said.... it is entirely possible to do all this with separate drives instead of just partitioning out one drive. It's even a little easier, especially if you can get away with having four hard drives (one small solid-state for boot; one for each OS - possibly solid state, too; and one for your documents). Of course, your mileage may vary.
Me? I'm using a laptop, so I'm stuck with one HD for now. When I do get to build myself a desktop, though, I would like to go for the four-drive setup.
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Hm. You ot a script of dumbed-down so I can print it off and hand it to my dad when he comes by to ask what the hell I'm cursing at in here? 
I know I have to do the 1950s office analogy a lot when talking about the simplest Windows installs. Directories are the drawers of a filing cabinet, the drives are the cabinets themselves, etc.
I already know I need to get a new Wireless adapter for my rig, since I was looking around for drivers for my dongle in Linux and found mention that only the XP drivers can be made to work in Linux... and I have 64-bit architecture. Seems Broadcomm manufactured the chips in my particular version, and they don't like FOSS Drivers. Not. One. Bit.
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Foxboy Wrote:...
I know I have to do the 1950s office analogy a lot when talking about the simplest Windows installs. Directories are the drawers of a filing cabinet, the drives are the cabinets themselves, etc.
... In that analogy, dual-boot is two people with very different ideas on the right way to do things sharing the same office (the computer).
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Hmmm. I have a Toshiba Satellite L305 laptop that I haven't been using since I got the MacBook... problem with it is, it came with Vista, and it has a bad tendency to freeze up if I leave it idle for more than a few minutes at a time.
Was considering putting some flavor of Linux on it, any recommendations?
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Well, it depends on the system architecture. I do know that Linux Mint 16/Petra works on a Vista-era laptop, but you have to use the kde or xfce desktop versions. The "shiny Hawtness" of Mint's preferred Cinnamon desktop requires 64-bit architecture.
Mint is pegged to Ubuntu, so that's an option as well, you just have to find a version that fits what you've got for architecture; the "default" version wants to go for a lot of shiny new stuff. Between the two of them, they've got the lion's share of Linux installs, so they've a robust file repository, and the Majority of Steam games for Linux process quite happily on them.
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Well.
Let's see.
I'm at work right now, but as I recall:
64-bit architecture
2.00 Core2Duo processor
4GB RAM
Intel craptastic on-MB graphics.
~300gb HDD
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I use Ubuntu, myself. I rather like it. This site here ( http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/index ) has great information and tutorials on using ubuntu for a windows-native. It's primarily intended for ubuntu, but has some foray into KDE and XFCE.
One thing I would like to note: If you're looking to do a "traditional" dual-boot, with repartioning your HHD and installing GNU Grub (the bootloader), I would warn you it is impressively difficult to fully remove ubuntu without a lot of work reinstalling the windows bootloader. If you aren't sure you want to keep this, I'd suggest using the Windows Ubuntu Installer ( WUBI). If you -do- want to repartition, and you're not using a LTS version, you may want to create a separate /home partition so you can do clean installs with (near) impunity and keep (almost) all your personal files. The OS is installed at the system root, aka /, but most user files and documents are stored under /home/. So if you have /home located on another partition you can wipe out / and reinstall it fresh without touching /home (as long as you tell the installer to use that partiton as /home).
I've done this many times, myself, so I'd be happy to give further instruction should you wish it.
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Quick note: WUBI does NOT work with any flavor of Windows 8. Or it takes so much arcane gibberish to get it to work it ain't worth it.
I'm just lucky I built this system myself so I don't have to deal with the Secure Boot drek. I hope.
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OK, I have Ubuntu 12.whatever downloaded and some blank DVDs to burn to. ($3 for a 10-pack at Staples, nice deal. Also got a 32-gig USB stick for $20.)
On the other hand, I may well have discovered the source of my issues with the laptop. It's narrowed down to either the screensaver I was using, or something in Vista's power-management software. I set the power management scheme to "never turn off" and chose a different screensaver, left it overnight, and this morning when I left for work it hadn't frozen up. So.
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Ooohhhh yeah. That whole hibernate/standby feature can cause all kinds of havoc if something is causing windows to not handle the page files properly.
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Well, there is also -definitely- HDD issues, I've already taken a backup of the drive.
It's been flaking a bit lately, slow to load programs, forcing a checkdisk every few reboots, etc. And while it didn't freeze up overnight it had BSOD'd by the time I got back from work.
So I've ordered 2 500-gig drives from NewEgg, and a 2-gig RAM chip to add to the mac. Got the torx drivers I need to disassemble the mac, too. Wal*Mart is occasionally useful. 
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