Windows

Linux & Open Source

Windows Removed

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A while back I mentioned a return to Linux in a Dual Boot situation on my Laptop. The motivation here, primarily, is that it’s a perfectly good laptop, and Windows 10 is “end of life” and going away. Also, frankly, I miss using Linux more. I ran Linux on my last laptop before it was eventually replaced.

I’ve takent he next step and completely removed Windows.

I’ve done this for one reason, which is mayt not fix, but it might. I have, occasionally, been getting random system freezes. I never got this in Windows. My “theory” here is as follows:

  • My laptop has two physical drives, one is one of the newer M2 whatever drives that looks like a long ram stick chip, the other is an old school 3.5″ SSD. It seems really fucking weird to call an SSD “old school” like that, but whatever.
  • The SSD probably isn’t lose, but I have always felt like it fits a little loose inside the bay. I even have a piece of folded paper crammed inside to help give it some cushon to sty in place.
  • I am worried that the SSD is slipping out a bit and causing issues.
  • Also it’s possible the SSD is failing, but I doubt it.

Whatever the case, my ultimate goal was to move Linux to the original M2 drive and replace Windows, and I’ve completed that task. It was surprisingly painless, but not without hiccups. I was alos pretty nervous at first that I would hose up the laptop’s boot ability. As such, I wanted to give a general rundown of the process.

Just for a baseline of relevant points. With Windows my laptop:

  • Had 1 original M2 Drive with Windows on it, in Linux, this shows as “sdb”
  • Ad added SSD with 2 partitions, one with the Linux Mint file system, “sda3”
  • One Parition mapped as /home labeled “sda2”
  • A handful of other smaller patitions on both drives
  • Boot was set up for UEFI Enabled, Secure Boot Disabled

My first step was getting rid of the Windows File System. I simply opened “Disks” in Mint, and deleted the Windows Partition and the Recovery partition on sdb. This ended up being unecesary, but I did it anyway. Just for the sake of my sanity, I also rebooted to make sure I could still boot to Linux Mint. I also made a note that “sda” is 240GB and “sdb” is 256GB.

I then downloaded Clonezilla and write it to a USB drive to boot from. This ended up beingn the most complicated step. All of the tools I usually use to make writable USB drives from ISO files, Yumi, Rufus, Ventoy, all seem to only work from Windows. I also didn’t have my Yumi USB drive handy to just put the ISO there and boot.

I came across this command but it didn’t seem to actually boot.sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress oflag=sync

It’s possible this did work, but I’ll touch at that later.

Ultimately, I discovered, that simply “right clicking” the .iso file, had a menu option to “Burn to Bootable USB”.

So I did that.

I also found that in order to boot from USB, I had to enter the BIOS, and turn off UEFI boot in favor of Legacy boot.

I booted to Clonezilla. I started to do a partition to partition clone but there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to clone sda3 (the file system) into the free/empty space of :”sdb”. So instead I just did a full disk clone of sda into sdb.

On reboot, I discovered that, I needed to reenable UEFI in order for things to work. After changing it back, I was in, Linux Mint booted just fine.

Next step was to clean up the duplicate partitions and resize each remainign parition to consume their respective drives. Actually my actual next step was to verify which copy of Mint I was running. I was going to drop some place holder test files, then reboot the machine and putz with the BIOS boot order. It turns out, I got lucky and I was already in the “new” copy on sdb. I was able to verify this because when I opebned Disks, the “old/original filesystem” partition, was not active. I simpley deleted it.

I also deleted the extra copy of “Home” that I had created on sdb.

Just for my own sanity, I did another reboot. Everything worked fine, and my home files mounted properly as expected. I now had the file system on the M2 drive sdb, and my home folder on the second drive of sda.

So now, I was ready to resize the partitions. Resizing the Homes drive was easy, I, once again, opened Disks, then did a resize and now it’s 240GB total.

The Filesystem was a bit less easy. Weirdly, I could, in the active file system, expand it to consime the 16GB or so at the “end” of the disk where the extra space now was (the new drive was 256GB vs the old SSD which was 240). What I couldn’t do was “pull it forward” to consime the 140GB or so that used to be the “home” partition.

So I went otu and downloaded a copy of Gparted this time, burned it to my USB stick, and rebooted. Now I was able to reize the file system to consume the entire remaining drive space.

This also meant toggling UEFI off and back on again.

Just for shits and giggles, I also decided to see what would happen if I enabled secure boot, which just entered into a weird boot loop. So I disabled that again, and finally, booted back into my now fully set up file system.

I can’t vouch for if it actually fixed my freeeze up issue yet. That may just be me over using it. I did also pick up some new memory for it, bumping it up to 16GB from 8GB, and also at a slightly faster clock speed.

Windows

One Month on Windows 10

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windows-10-logoI held off a bit on the whole “Free Update to Windows 10” thing.  I’m still a bit apprehensive on the whole issue, it feels like there might eventually be a “catch” of some kind.  There probably isn’t, more likely, it’s just an attempt to get everyone on the same page so to speak.  It makes everything better and easier for them.  Easier for security, easier to maintain, easier for developers to make apps they “know” will work.

It’s part of the beauty of phones, on some level, they are all mostly the same.  Except of course for the 50 different versions of Android floating around due to manufacturer cruft and skins and carrier differences and phones that don’t get updated, etc etc.  Still, even if 50 wasn’t an exaggeration, it’s a small fraction of the potential different versions of Windows out there from XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Monthly and weekly patches, Service Packs and updates.

So, anyway, it’s been about a month since I did the upgrade on my Windows 7 desktop.  I’m generally happy with it all around, aside from my one major issue.

The Good

It’s not Windows 8.  Windows 10 has a lot of the best features of Windows 8, but it doesn’t have the annoyances.  The goofy full screen start screen mostly, I have no idea how that would work on my multi monitor set up.  It doesn’t have the annoying charms bar or crap popping in and out all over on the edges.  It does have the live tiles and all that jazz.

It runs just fine, I haven’t really noticed an increase or decrease in performance honestly.

It also has the store, which is a nice optional way to get programs and apps and other things.

The Bad

ScreenShot394Apps and live tiles are great, if they work.  They don’t seem to work very smoothly at all.  Most of the time they just show their basic icon.  On the other hand, it’s kind of frustrating when they have a live tile photo of some kind because now the app isn’t obvious.  I don’t know how many time I went looking for the Facebook app because it had someone’s profile photo on it.

Groove Music is a horrible piece of crap.  This is Microsoft’s music store/player.  I had similar issues on my phone with Xbox Music.  I have a decent collection of music, from the free promo Microsoft ran last year to the 10 cent sale they ran this year, I have quite a few albums.  The thing is, I also have music from Google, and a lot fo music from Amazon and some ripped from CDs.  I manage all my music as local files, or with the Synology Music player on my NAS.  This means downloading the files, which you can do with Groove music, when it doesn’t time out or fail, or reload thinking it hasn’t downloaded any files yet.  There also isn’t any way to manage the download Queue at all, even basic controls like a pause function would be nice.  Instead, I can start some downloads, then walk away, but if I want to halt things to clear up bandwidth, I have to close the program, which screws everything up again.

The Really Really Ugly…

I don’t know the root cause, I new will, but the Windows 10 November Update totally screwed up my machine.  In searching for the fix, I found others had had the same issue and it’s a relatively special case.

I dual boot Ubuntu Linux, which means when the machine boots, it brings up the boot loader, GRUB, which has configuration files on the Linux partition.  I rarely actually use this other OS, especially since I get my Linux fix on  my Laptop these days, but it’s there.  Honestly, part of the reason I still keep it around is because I don’t want to hassle with removing GRUB.

This update, apparently messes witht he partition tables, and potentially the partitions themselves, because during the update, my machine became unable to boot.  It restarted and I got an error in GRUB that it couldn’t detect any OSes.  I went and found a boot repair tool from Ubuntu, but the tool did nothing.  Eventually I opted to simply reinstall Ubuntu, thus reinstalling and restoring GRUB, and I found what seemed to be a large chunk of “Empty Space” on my main drive.  I reinstall Ubuntu into the hole, ran the repair tool, which fixed the base install since it could now see an OS, then reconfigured GRUB to see Windows.

I fixed it, but it was a massive hassle, one that shouldn’t have been an issue.

I seriously hope this doesn’t happen with any future major releases, the next should be in 2016 with Redstone 1.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

The Bill Gates Report – 08-25-1997

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In High School, I had a class called Engineering Technology. It essentially consisted of a series of different modules that smaller groups of the class would work on at different times, rotating around maybe once a week (That is, one group worked on module A while another on module B, etc). One of the modules was to write about someone influential in the world of Technology. I did my report on Bill Gates. It’s kind of interesting to note that, while not great, it’s amazing how much better writing can be when the author actually cares about the subject. PS, i have no idea how Bill Gates could have been born on the 88th of October but for the sake of posterity, I am leaving it as is…

My report is about one of the most influential people in the modern world of computers. He’s head and founder of the largest software company in the world. He literally invented the operating system used by most if not all of the IBM computers in the world. He’s also the richest man in the world. He’s worth at least 6.7 billion dollars and that number increases daily. This man is William H. Gates III, and this is his story.

Bill Gates was born on October 88th of the year 1955. He was the youngest of the three Gates children. He was already considered a genius by the young age of thirteen. He had already started to do some computer programming. His nickname as he was growing up was Trey. This was because he was the third child. His family was very prominent in the area. His fathers name was William H. Gates II. He is an attorney. His mothers name is Mary. She is a regent at the University of Washington and a director of the First Interstate Bank. He went to a private school in Seattle called Lakeside. He started at Harvard University in 1973. After two years he dropped out. He felt he needed to get started now on life and the business word. He and his friend Paul Allen became business partners and wrote a version of BASIC computer language. This new BASIC worked on the new Altair computers. They moved to Albuquerque, the home of the Altair computer. There they started Micro-soft. They moved the company to Seattle in 1973. They left behind the hyphen and the company became the more familiar Microsoft. In 1980 IBM came to Microsoft in search of an efficient operating system. Thus the modern PC era began.

The first big success of Microsoft was the MS-DOS operating system. MS-DOS is an acronym for MicroSoft-Disk Operating System. It is currently used on ninety percent of the world’s IBMs and IBM clone computers. Later the company made a jump ahead again with Windows. Unlike DOS, Windows uses graphics called Icons to manipulate programs rather than text. Windows runs on top of DOS and many programs still use DOS to run though so it’s still used as much as it once was. Micro soft supplies about fifty percent of the worlds software applications. Several of these available now are, Excel for spreadsheets, Microsoft Word for word processing, and Access for data bases. They also create several networking applications, multimedia applications, CD-ROMs, books, and several Macintosh applications.

His invention, the DOS operating system, has had a great impact on the modern computing world. It’s used everyday by millions of people. It paved the way for other systems such as Windows. It allowed people to easily access all kinds of information without having to know a lot of technical data. Sure without it I guess someone would have come up with some way to get around in a computer, but who knows if it would have worked or been worth while. And who knows if an easy to use Windows type system would have developed. Bill Gates’ s invention has revolutionized the computer world.

As you can see Bill Gates is definitely one of America’s great inventors. Sure he didn’t put a bunch of pieces together and make a car or a light bulb. Just because he didn’t come up with the formula to cause a nuclear reaction or mix up the first batch of Spam doesn’t make him any less of an inventor. He put the pieces of computer information together and came up with the formula for DOS and changed the way people use computers forever.