On Sat, May 07, 2022 at 11:04:00PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
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.
I know some laptops have the problem that they hide the nvme drive behind the intel raid controller which meant linux wouldn't see it. Some had an option to disable that and make it appear as a regular nvme drive but some don't. Other than that I am surprised it didn't find it. Old version of clonezilla?
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.
That's good.
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.
Having /boot on / as ext4 is perfectly fine with grub and has been for many years. /boot/efi on the other hand has to be the fat UEFI boot partition that is shared by all installed OSs to store the boot loader. The EFI partition is NOT /boot. /boot stores files controlled by your linux distribution and needs linux file permissions. FAT doesn't do that. /boot/efi stores booloader files, not boot files.
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 ....
I know debian says not to use rufus since it often breaks the installer. Using a disk image writing tool works. dd on linux or win32diskimager for windows. -- Len Sorensen