My Linux Laptop

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/315218/index.html

After all my adventures I ended up with a really cool Linux laptop, wait..that’s what I wanted in the first place!

So I bought a laptop that of course came with Windows on it. I figured I would just boot into a Linux distro from a jump drive and see how that goes. It had its ups and downs but I got it to work.

Then I decided I would try and dual boot Linux and Windows which is where I ran into a boot sector issue. I couldn’t get Linux to install even after trying several different popular versions including SuSE, PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint and Ubuntu.

By luck or mere happenstance I finally came across the version of Linux that I needed to get past the install error. I really don’t know why but the install program in Garuda Linux was able to write to the hard drive without issue and I was actually able to install Linux onto my laptop!

I really like the look and feel of the desktop and the effects that are already enabled. It’s KDE with a twist or two. If you get a chance, go to distrotest.net and try it out for yourself. In the different versions, there is one called “KDE Dragonized”. That is the one I have installed on my machine.

I finally got Linux to install but I quickly found out that I couldn’t log into Windows anymore. I could choose to boot into it first from the boot menu and get to the login screen but when I entered either my pin or password I would get a “Invalid Credentials” error. So I could boot into Linux but not Windows.

I did some research and found only a few others that had my issue with credential errors logging into Windows from a dual booting computer with no real fixes that I could find. I thought about it and realized why do I want to dual boot anyway? My friend Donny asked me why even bother keeping it around? I’m never going to use my Windows install anyway. And he’s right, I won’t.

Ok, so here I am with a laptop that I finally got Linux to install too and now it won’t boot into the Windows install it came with. I was only wanting to keep Windows around for some hypothetical reason that I might need it someday for some reason I could never think of if you really asked me. Donny was right, why keep it around if I’m not even going to use it?

Well, I quickly got up the courage and booted into the jump drive and from there installed Garuda Linux over everything including Windows. I only have Linux on my laptop now. Woo Hoo! It has been a few months now and everything works. Every time I have needed it to do something it has been able to do it. Internet, bluetooth, camera etc.

I have been experimenting with Linux commands on the command line and learning about the changes and modifications I can do from there, I’m no guru but I am doing my best to learn and keep learning. I have not had any issues with programs running like they are supposed to or getting errors even though Garuda is a ‘rolling release’ distro. The system prompts me to update every week or so, I update, the system works.

It’s a beautiful thing. It’s My Linux Laptop.

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Laptop Dual Boot Project: Part 2

Originally published 30-Nov-2021 http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/294659/index.html

Here continues my journey to boot different versions of Linux onto my laptop and see how things go.

PCLinuxOS

I used Rufus to install PCLinuxOS onto my 8gig jump-drive while running in Windows 10. I set the Persistent Partition Size to 5gigs and the install seemed to go without a hitch. It recognized all my hardware and the backlight on my keyboard even works! I was able to do some updates and install Chrome easily. After booting out of Linux, back into Windows and then into Linux again none of my changes were saved. My friend Don’s first suggestion was that it might be a permissions issue. Looks like I need to do some research.

Kubuntu

I downloaded Kubuntu (2.6gigs) and installed it on my new 32gig jump-drive and tried it out…wow it was SLOW! It took minutes just to open a program or browser. I figured it had to be something to do with the Plasma desktop or Kubuntu in general because my Linux Mint jump-drive and my PCLinuxOS jump-drive, they run nice and fast. I am going to install a different version of Linux on my 32gig and see if it something to do with the jump-drive itself. I tried it on another of my jump drives and it was still really slow in all facets of operation no matter what program or file I was opening/using.

Ubuntu

I loaded Ubuntu onto a jump drive and booted into it just fine. It’s interesting to use Ubuntu every so often. It’s cool to see Linux as most new people get to see Linux and notice the differences of style and presentation from the other distros I use. I like Ubuntu, I just don’t use it very often. Maybe that’ll change.

Linux Mint

Once I tried Linux Mint a couple of years ago it has quickly become my ‘other’ favorite. My first one being PCLinuxOS. Linux Mint is pretty without losing functionality. I like the ‘flow’ of Mint under Cinnamon. It makes any computer or laptop seem like a jazzy new computer the way it looks and acts.

SUSE

I got SUSE installed to one of my jump drives fine and ran it ‘live’. A lot has changed with SUSE over the years but it loaded and ran just fine. It was snappy even. I guess I am just too used to Windows or at least the ‘classic’ Windows theme. SUSE seems foreign to me now. I remember running OpenSuSE back in the day and loving it, oh well.

VirtualBox

I decided to give the virtual machine a try. I got it to install fairly easily and got PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint ‘installed’ on it. The performance hit is noticeable. Opening files and programs takes a few seconds to get going but once they are, they run fine. The one program that it was really choppy and noticeable was the web browser. Firefox is the default for both PCLOS and Mint. and getting it to log into and load my Google account and g-mail took longer than it should have. A lot of this has to do with the amount of RAM you dedicate to the virtual machine during the VirtualBox setup.

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I know some of you are wondering why go through all of this when I could just install a Linux distro along side of windows and be done with it? One reason was I had to pay it off. A financed $550 laptop takes a little while to pay off. I didn’t want to change the machine any while I owed money on it. And the idea of messing with a bone stock laptop using Linux sounded fun. The good thing now is that I have paid it off so it’s all mine to do whatever I want with.

So, for me it came down to PCLOS, Mint, SUSE or Ubuntu to install to my laptop. I tried them all ‘live’ from USB drives and a couple of them using VirtualBox. They are all good distros and there are many articles on why one or the other is good or better for you but for me, it came down to PCLinuxOS or Mint. Having come from Windows originally I am most comfortable with a “Windows like” environment. I think both PCLOS and Mint are two versions of that I like best. I like Mint more but what has drawn me to PCLOS is that it is the only Linux I have tried in that the backlight on my keyboard works. It may sound dumb but it makes it easier for me being able to see the keys no matter the lighting situation I’m in.

I tried to install PCLinuxOS onto my laptop and I got a “can’t call method on first_usable_sector unblessed reference” error at the very beginning of the install process. I couldn’t get around it and aborted the install. Time to do some research. Come to find out I have a AHCI-RAID problem. I got into the BIOS and changed the SATA configuration from RAID to AHCI but in rebooting, it wouldn’t boot.

So I went back into my BIOS and wrote down the configuration in the SATA settings. It says I am running the “Intel RST Premium with Intel Optane System Acceleration”. I have been looking that up but haven’t found much…much I understand that is. More Googling is required.

I got back into the boot menu and changed the SATA config back to Intel’s RAID setting and it re-booted just fine. It seems that for the moment I am able to run Linux from USB ‘live’ and under VirtualBox but I am unable to install it to the HD. For those who don’t know the big difference AHCI and Raid , it is how they store the data to the hard drive.

I’ll use a sink with water filling it for the metaphor. RAID 1 offers redundancy through mirroring, i.e., data is written identically to two drives. Think of two sinks with the same water in them. RAID 0 offers no redundancy and instead uses striping, i.e., data is split across all the drives. think of two sinks with the water split between them. Half of the data goes into one drive and the other half into another drive. This means RAID 0 offers no fault tolerance; if the drives fails, the RAID unit fails.

Because the laptop I own came with Windows pre-installed someone chose RAID (0 or 1 I assume, I haven’t figured it out yet) instead of AHCI as the format for data saving to my HD and now I can’t seem to install Linux..any Linux, to my laptop.

My friend Don says all is not lost, there may be a way around it still. We’ll see. The adventure continues..

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Laptop Dual Boot Project

Originally published 30-Nov-2020 http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/293686/index.html

I got a new laptop and I want to use a jump-drive to run different versions of Linux on it. These are my adventures..

Its cool, it is a 15” ASUS VivoBook, with an Intel core i3 10th gen running Windows 10 on it. It has a 120gig HD with 80 of them still free to use. All I have done to it is install Chrome and LibreOffice 7.0. That’s it. So far everything I do on my laptop I do on the internet so I only use Chrome while being connected to the internet. I’ve had my new laptop for a couple of months now and being the lover of Linux and all things FOSS I really want to use Linux instead of Windows but I need to keep Windows around in case I need it for something I just absolutely can’t do without it. I also need to keep Windows so that in case I need to I can take advantage of the 2 year warranty that came with the laptop.

So, the answer? I want to install Linux onto a USB drive and boot into Linux from there. That way the laptop stays in “stock” condition. I have two jump-drives, a 16gig and an 8gig that I can use to install different versions of Linux onto and see if they work with my laptop’s hardware. I have loved Linux and all things FOSS for the last 15 years or so and I have learned a lot but I make no claims on being an expert. That distinction is for others who know far more than I. One of those people is my good friend Donald Carter. We have known each other for..what is it? 10, 15 years now, I’ve lost count. He is an expert. I’m not.

I’m just dangerous enough to want to mess with the hardware I own and software I use. He has been supporting computer hardware and software in one form or another for a long time. I asked Don for his help and he said yes. Thank the Gods! So here we go..

I did a Google search how to install Linux to a USB drive and found a article on the Instructables website with a link to a program called Universal-USB-Installer v1.9.9.7 which I downloaded and used to install an .iso of LinuxMint onto my 16gig jump-drive. Everything went fine and it installed to my 16gig. I didn’t mess with any of the settings at all. I then restarted my laptop while pressing F12 over and over to get it to go into the boot menu before loading Windows. I learned that you have to be pressing F12 at just the right moment to get into the Windows boot menu, apparently Windows is finicky because it took me several tries to get it too.

Once I got into the boot menu I selected the USB drive option and it booted into Mint without issue. It did take a while to load (20+ seconds or so) which compared to Windows (5 or 6 seconds) was a lot longer but after that the desktop loaded just fine. Everything seems to work and it recognized my network adapter too. The biggest issues I saw was that any changes I made to the OS (Desktop changes, software installations etc.) aren’t saved and when I log out of Mint, log into Windows and back into Mint again are lost and it goes back to the default install again. That and the keyboard back-light doesn’t work. Also, I noticed was that it did not see all of the storage on the 16gig jump-drive.

Man, I’m tellin’ ya..its not a MAJOR jump, but there is to my eye a noticeable difference in the speed of things running in Mint over Windows. Even in Chrome using the same network connection I would in Windows, it feels like it is faster. It loads pages and videos faster than in windows. Programs open faster, it’s amazing. All off of a USB drive! When I close my laptop lid (while still using Mint) which in Windows usually shuts the computer down. And to my pleasure when opening the lid this time it took me to my Mint desktop. I love it!

One cool thing I have noticed during all this is that changes I make inside the browser (moving/changing/adding bookmarks, changing extension settings etc.) are saved and I see them when I log into Windows and open Chrome there. But I know that is all in my Google account which has nothing to do with whether I am logged into Linux or Windows.

Well in the course of writing this article I started to get a “Invalid signature detected. Check secure boot policy in setup” error. I asked Don and he said it must be a setting in the BIOS and I did some searching on the Internet and sure enough I found out that I needed to disable the secure boot up. So I restarted my computer and did this:

Pressed F2 to the BIOS menu.

From the main tab, use the right arrow key (?) to navigate to the Security tab, Authentication tab, or Boot tab. You’ll find the Secure Boot menu under one of them (depending on your BIOS/UEFI setup utility).

Use the down arrow key to select the option and then press Enter.

Select Secure Boot Control.

Choose Disabled.

I did all of that and bang! The error was gone the next time I booted into my jump-drive. Yay! One issue down, but the story isn’t over yet.

I noticed when looking at my jump-drive in the filesystem that it only showed 5gigs of the 16gigs on the drive and wondered why. Talking with Don we figured out that one of the settings I didn’t mess with when installing Mint was the Persistent Partition Size which I left at zero. This Explains why any programs I installed or changes I made to the system were not being saved.

The Persistent Partition Size is the amount of space allocated for changes made to the system to be able to save. It should enable me to download things, install programs and have them saved to the USB drive and see them across devices I plug it into.

I decided to re-install Mint onto the jump-drive and change the Persistent Partition Size from zero to the maximum amount allowed (12gigs) and see what happens. Well, I did that and on the next reboot into Mint got a ‘loop0’ error. Again I asked Don and he said I should do some googling to find the answer and I did. I found that to fix it I had to do all kinds of scripting on the command line.

I’ll be honest, in all the time I have been using Linux I have gotten into the command line only a few times. I know from reading and talking to others that unless you know what you are doing you really shouldn’t mess with the command line at all. A naive user can seriously mess things up if you do things wrong in there and I am not that confident in my skills to go into the command line without someone very knowledgeable standing over my shoulder to guide me.

My friend Don lives in Oregon and I live in Arizona so he can only help me so much from a distance and I decided that I was not going to get into the command line and walk around unless I absolutely had too. Don said that it might have something to do with the program I was using to install Linux onto my jump-drive.

At the beginning of all this Don had recommended that I use Rufus to install my Linux iso’s but I didn’t take his advice (which I should have) so I downloaded Rufus and used it to check the drive for errors and re-install Mint onto my 16gig jump-drive. I set the Persistent Partition Size to the maximum amount allowed (12gigs again) and installed Mint onto the jump-drive. After installing I booted into it and shazam! No loop0 error, Yay! Another issue taken care of.

I have now installed the Google Chrome browser, changed my desktop background and adjusted the time and date settings so they are correct, that’s all. Since Mint already comes with LibreOffice I do not have to install it. Now I’m going to boot into Windows and back into Mint and see of the changes I stick..

Yes! I booted into and out of Windows and back into Mint on my jump-drive and all the changes I made stuck. I love it! The only glaring issue left that I can see (no pun intended) is the back-light on my keyboard not working. But I am not going to worry about that right now. Well, now that I am satisfied with my Mint install its on to other distributions to test. In Part 2 I am going to start testing out other distros and see what happens, wish me luck!

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The LXer Interview: Ulf Sandberg, CEO of SkySQL

LXer Article

Recently SkySQL announced itself to the world with its focus being on former Sun MySQL customers. This comes in the aftermath of Sun being bought by Oracle and the subsequent departures of former Sun executives and engineers before and after the purchase. I recently had a chance to talk with Ulf Sandberg the new CEO of SkySQL for a few minutes.

Q: It looks to me that most, if not all of the original architects of MySQL are either invested in or an active part of SkySQL.

A: Yes, both co-founders and OnCorps as well as Open Ocean Capital, which is comprised of some of the founders of and investors in MySQL Ab as well. – OnCorps being major investor, they wanted the most for their money and they will be involved in keeping us focused on sales and revenue. Bob Suh, CEO and Founder of OnCorps who used to be at accenture wanted to be in on it. We have almost all of the core developers and support team and we are selling that to our prospective customers. Knowing that most of the people you used to get support and service from are here at SkySQL makes it a much easier choice for them.

Q: I take it you are actively selling your services to all your old customers at Sun and MySQL then, how is that going?

A: “We’re back”, we are telling people that MySQL took a break but now we’re up and running again. To our customers, they have an alternative for pricing and services as compared to Oracle and can decide for themselves what is best. I think everyone can see what is going on with Oracle and with us in the market now they have a choice as to who they want to get their support and services from going into the future.

Q: So having already done business with them as Sun they were familiar with you and you philosophy correct?

A: The ecosystem and partners want to talk to people they know, along with the commitment to open source and keeping the code open. Most companies do not want to be hostage to one vendor, especially one that charges a lot for their products and service. They now have an alternative in SkySQL and we have already received a number of requests from companies that would rather be with the original MySQL team and our reasonable pricing model and not hand cuffed by Oracle. They also do not trust that Oracle will supoort open source and MySQL down the road but will try to upsell them as soon as they can to more expensive but typically not needed product.

Q: It seems obvious that the takeover of Sun by Oracle lit a fire to make this happen. A lot of people think it was Oracle’s attitude towards the developers that did it, MySQL started bleeding execs and devs even before the sale to Oracle was official.

A: We saw what was going on and decided it was best to go in another direction. The deal took a long time to close and some MySQL folks were already leaving prior to completion. We did expect Oracle to continue with the acquisition, similar to what they have done to other companies they bought. They have no prior experience of open source nor interest as evident from how OpenSolaris, OpenOffice and as of lately Java has been managed by Oracle.

Q: Is Oracle really committed to MySQL?

A: Depends on who you ask, they are really focused on sales..

Q: Isn’t the writing on wall for MySQL?

A: Sun had soft gloves, maybe too soft. Oracle is much more about “Here is what you are going to do and how your going to do it.” and it just is not how we feel it should be done. How could Oracle balance both their enterprise database offerings which are very expensive with the popular MySQL database in their accounts? Their sales people just don’t want MySQL in their accounts and become a threat to their high price. They might say they are supporting MySQL externally but in reality, there is such an internal conflict that it likely can not happen.

After reading this article by Henrik Ingo and talking to Ulf I think that there is more than enough room in the ‘MySQL” world for SkySQL to not only survive, but thrive as well. If there is one thing I have learned it is that there is a ton of talented people who can code SQL and if you can find and keep them, you’re going to be alright.

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LXer Weekly Roundup for 05-Dec-2010

LXer Article

In the LXWR this week we have part 1 and 2 of Steven Rosenberg’s farewell to Fedora. why Glyn Moody is rooting for Microsoft, a long overdue look at XFCE, Dr. Tony Young’s final (or is it?) installment in his switching to KDE 4.4 adventures and the Linux foundation releases their annual list of who writes Linux. Enjoy!

Goodbye Fedora, welcome back Debian, Part 1: I really did like Fedora 13. I liked it enough to solve more than a handful of problems. I liked it enough to use a proprietary graphics driver for the first time (didn’t like that; not only was it outside the package-management system and hard to update, it didn’t perform so well either). I love the Fedora community, the openness that’s everywhere, the lack of pretense. But just as everything was roses, furry kittens and such when I first ran Fedora 13 with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel, it started to go dark with the change — in mid-cycle, mind you — to the 2.6.34 kernel.

Open Source Does Not Need Monetising: It’s common to hear commentators and business leaders justifying practices that wouldn’t be recognised as “open source” by many of us on the grounds that they have to make money somehow. Actions that deny the software freedoms of end users – and even developers – appear like a fungus, spuriously justified by the need for profit. Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants. Open source is the pragmatic product and projection of software freedom.

How a “Welded-to KDE 3.5 User” Began a Move to KDE 4.4 – Part 2: In this second part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. In this installment he configures media players, K3b, Crossover Office, Lucid and Post Script and his final thoughts on his adventures.

Why I’m Rooting for Microsoft: It will not have escaped your notice that the patent system has been the subject of several posts on this blog, or that the general tenor is pretty simple: it’s broken, and nowhere more evidently so than for software. Anyone can see that, but what is much harder is seeing how to fix it given the huge vested interests at work here.

The bad guys are worried – did we win?: Recently two pieces of first class anti-free software diatribe hit the headlines. The first is Microsoft’s “please don’t use OpenOffice.org” video and the second is Steve Jobs’ anti-Android rant. Both are pretty shallow attempts at deflection and have been rightly called out as actually endorsing the subject of the attack as a valid opponent. In both cases it does seem to say that Microsoft and Jobs are concerned enough about OpenOffice.org and Android respectively that they need to tell the rest of us how bad they are.

6 Best Linux Terminal Applications for Linux: A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

Goodbye Fedora, welcome back Debian, Part 2: Review of Debian Squeeze: I’ve been keeping my eye on Debian Squeeze (and Sid) for the past few months via live images, and in the course of the release’s life there have been changes in the application lineup. Notable inclusions in the now-frozen Squeeze are the Ubuntu Software Center as an alternative way of managing applications. Yep, you read right: Debian is using the Ubuntu Software Center. It looks like Debian’s developers are in a more cooperative mood than they get credit for. I for one am glad to see such cross-pollination between Ubuntu and Debian.

A Long Overdue Look at XFCE: Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve covered Linux desktop issues of all kinds, and we’ve examined desktop environments both well known (Gnome and KDE) as well as somewhat obscure (Window Maker, LXDE). For some reasons, we’ve never taken a close look at the very popular XFCE desktop environment. It’s nearly as feature-rich as Gnome, but with a smaller footprint. As it’s been a big name in the Linux desktop world for quite a few years now, it seems we’re long overdue to check out this polished and useful collection of software.

World Wildlife Fund WWF format cracked!: I heard about the new .WWF format this morning. It is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund to prevent people printing .PDF files. As a matter of fact, it is a .PDF format, but slightly modified and with the “no printing” flag enabled. But I don’t like it when people are forbidding me something. It is sending the wrong message. So I set out to crack it.

Who Writes Linux?: This is an annual report published by The Linux Foundation that measures the the rate of Linux kernel development, who is doing it (developer names) and who is sponsoring it (company names). It has become an annual check on the state of the world’s largest open source project and collaborative development effort.

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