Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am starting a series on installing Linux on my sister’s desktop. Let’s get started!
The Plan
My sister has expressed an interest in digital privacy and switching to Linux. She showed interest in installing Linux on her computer this week, and I just got a pair of new SSD’s on sale while shopping for my Arch installation, so I’m using one of those for this installation.
To the best of my experience, PopOS has been the distro of choice to use in terms of compatibility and privacy – by that I mean it has access to the Ubuntu library while System76, the company that makes it, advertises itself as being more privacy aware. While I’ve had problems with it in the past, they weren’t too difficult to sort out. It has a straightforward installer, and then their website has a selection of commands to install a preferred desktop environment. In short: it’s my favorite distro for beginners.
Hardware Installation 1
My sister left me a note inviting me to start work at my convenience, only for a Windows update to pop up while her system was unattended. I got her message before it was obscured, but I still found the irony funny.
For reference, I am working with a 1TB SATA SSD. About as soon as I had the case open, I was scavenging the technology pile for a SATA cable and a power connector from the supply I replaced a while back. The computer screws I found gave me too much trouble attaching it to her computer’s bracket, so I left it loose, later securing it with electrical tape several hours and “learning moments” later.
PopOS Install 1
Computer motherboards have what’s known as firmware, often referred to as BIOS, though recently replaced by UEFI. For the rest of this post, BIOS refers to the old, limited firmware exclusively. My sister’s computer boots with UEFI, and it was displaying on her WACOM graphical tablet where I missed it for playing around with HDMI connections on the graphics card so I could override boot to a USB drive with the latest PopOS install media.
I forget how, but the tablet-monitor went unnoticed until it was the sole output with the installer. I took special care to make sure I was installing to the blank drive, and not over her Windows installation. This was especially important because the system already had a 1 TB hard drive. After that, I put on the KDE desktop environment.
A minor, still-unresolved nuisance was the main monitors constantly being swapped. You can swap cables, or physical devices. Somehow, they always end up swapped. I also noticed some sort of U/I ghosting and horizontal line flickering I solved by removing the WACOM tablet entirely (it was mirrored to one screen – possibly both directions).
I finished up my first day arguing Minecraft into working (barely). I installed MultiMC and GraalVM, only for her modded world to require Java 8 (not an option at present for GraalVM). I was able to link up OpenJDK 8, which came preinstalled. I had to duck back into Windows to disable fastboot so Linux could mount the Windows drive and she can play the same world in either operating system using a symbolic link (shortcut) there. Despite Minecraft only launching around 1 in every 30-50 attempts, we were able to leave her world running “overnight” – which turned out to be only a few minutes after walking away. We found Linux in a mess in the morning. Very little worked, but it all pointed to hard drive failure. It wouldn’t even boot after requiring a forced shutdown. We ended up trying a SATA cable from an old church office computer in our stock – praise God, it cleared up the issue! It still didn’t solve Minecraft from arguing with video drivers:
java: ../nouveau/pushbuf.c:730: nouveau_pushbuf_data: Assertion `kref' failed.
or throwing SIGSEGV errors I haven’t begun to investigate yet.
All this time, I was thinking about how GRUB (Grand Universal Boot Loader) was never able to see Windows, like in the other systems I’ve dual booted. To my dismay, I found PopOS was running in legacy BIOS mode, where Windows was in UEFI mode. The two will never be able to see each other. A reinstall was in order.
PopOS Install 2
Dual booting is no joke if you don’t know what you’re doing. If it were my system, I’d have just taken the hit and accepted the need to select an operating system at the firmware-level. But no, I want an intuitive menu my sister can use. Unfortunately, this meant reinstalling in UEFI mode. To help with that, the folks at r/TechSupport pointed me to Ventoy and instructions on how to set it up with a GPT (General Partition Table for UEFI) instead of an MBR (Master Boot Record for BIOS).
I used my new Ventoy USB to reinstall PopOS, being sure to select the NVIDIA drivers version of the install disk image and choosing the more KDE-native display manager sddm over GDM3 when prompted.
UEFI is a pain to dual boot.
GRUB did not come installed this time. I tried installing grub-efi, but was never able to get it to work correctly, even after installing something for it to /dev/sdX. After much reading, I concluded that a simpler alternative to GRUB may be more suited to this application as the last of my stamina for the week depleted.
Takeaway
I thought this would be a nice, little side project done in a couple hours with a tough issue here or there. WRONG!
Final Question
Have you ever had a project fight you every. step. of. the. way?