Or maybe I'm not keeping track of chapters.
As some of you know, I've been on a quest to upgrade my daily desktop from
Windows to a dual-boot Linux system (and eventually, I hope, to eliminate
Windows). As some of you know, I've been replacing systems with dual-boot
(first Unix, then Linux) on systems for almost 30 years, though I don't
have that technical a bent. But I swear, things are getting harder rather
than easier for the non-technical.
First step was backing up the Windows and getting ready on my newer,
double-the-size M.2 drive. Cloning the old drive was the best option, but
not using Clonezilla which was absolutely useless to me. Couldn't find the
Windows drive, despite multiple tries. Maybe it did, but its UI is beyond
awful. Tried many hours before giving up. I had considerably greater
success with the free version of Macrium Reflect, which knew exactly what I
wanted to do and did it with ease.
Swapping the hardware was easy enough, given that my system's motherboard
has two M.2 sockets even though it's several years old. System boots
Windows just fine, identical to what I had before except I now have 250GB
unallocated.
Online help about how to partition a Linux system is as confused as ever,
some saying a single partition will do for everything, and others saying
that even a UEFI system needs a separate ext4 partition for /boot even if
there is an existing EFI one already there.
And then the final step (i thought) -- installing. I decided, after hearing
from everyone here, that MX Linux KDE would be the best combination of
things I needed and things I didn't. Downloaded the bootable image and used
Rufus, where I had to decide if the bootable USB stick would be GPT or MBR
(not obvious to a newcomer). All loaded, reboot, and ....
no graphics.
The mouse pointer shows up for a half second and vanishes, with the screen
at alt-F1 inviting me to do a CLI install whose partition choices threaten
to wipe out my windows system and don't have an intuitive way to customize.
Thankfully (I think), I was able to scp the X.org log file to another
computer so I wouldn't lose it on the USB stick's live boot. I attach it
below, and ask assistance from anyone who can read these files so I can
understand why it's dying. My graphics card is a fairly recent AMD RX 6500
XT which works fine under Windows and is claimed to be supported by X.
Or do I just give up on MX? A search on its forum appears to draw blanks,
except for me to boot in failsafe mode which didn't change anything. Will
this be better on another distro?
One option is to boot a gparted live stick, partition as I want, install
Linux VIA MX's CLI and pray it updates with current graphics drivers. But
sheesh.
One would think that given 20 years to improve the install experience, it
can be more confusing than ever. Any help is appreciated.
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
