Windows/Linux Dual Boot Installation Nightmare…and Reprieve
In spite of concerns over Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft, I still wanted to give Novell’s openSUSE Linux a try. I wanted to put Linux on my desktop, as part of my “weaning myself off of Microsoft” plan, and I had this idea that a corporate-backed open source distribution might be “safer” for my system. Boy, was I wrong about that.
I have two hard drives, and on the recommendation of someone on some forum somewhere in cyberspace, I eschewed the dual boot option (which would have meant screwing around with the Master Boot Record loading up my Windows) and simply unplugged my master hard drive and installed directly to drive two. Then, once both hard drives are online, all I have to do to boot Linux is to go into the boot options (in the BIOS) and select the second hard drive. Easy as pie!
(I don’t think this option will work with all computers…particularly older ones. I have bad memories of jumper pins and master/slave relationships.)
Unfortunately, the pie did not last. I was able to get through the openSUSE 11 installation dialogue just fine…though the partitioning dialogue was a bit confusing. I had an old Windows partition. All I wanted was to have it wipe it and install fresh. SUSE wanted to shrink the Windows partition by default to keep it on there. This is a great option to have, but it would have been better to have the option to just format from scratch. I had to manually set up my partitions…not something a newbie would be able to do.
Once openSUSE was installed, I was able to login and see a nice pretty green desktop. Great!
Now, I realize I took a chance by installing KDE4, but I do have KDE4 running on one of my laptops that has an ATI driver, and it works fine. So I figured it should work on my desktop, right? Wrong.
The minute I went in to change my settings to “desktop effects,” the monitor went haywire. I could not get back to the dialogue box to even tell it not to keep the settings. From there, I got a black screen of death.
Well, whoops, I had forgotten to install the ATI driver. But really…shouldn’t openSUSE tell you somewhere in your installation that you need a proprietary driver? Geez oh pete. Talk about setting people up for failure.
I managed to get back into X Windows by using the Ice Windows Manager. From there I installed the ATI driver. Now it was worse. The screen was at the wrong resolution, and the panel at the bottom was somewhere in Antarctica.
I went into the video settings tool (which I found out online was called “SAX2″). Well, this did not help. More black screens of death. I fiddling around with settings and command line prompts and then finally thought, geez, why not just do a reinstall, and install the ATI driver first?
To make a long story short: It did not matter. The ATI driver on openSUSE (at least with my monitor) is a losing propsition. Many black screens of death later, I finally gave up.
I downloaded the most recent version of Kubuntu and got it up in no time. It is now running perfectly, with the ATI driver functioning just fine. My KDE4 desktop is set up the way I want it, and it looks great (except for the stupid boxes around the widgets). My biggest problem was getting compiz-fusion going, but it just turned out I hadn’t installed all the software needed.
Now I have both Windows XP and Linux on my main machine. I have set it up so my profiles for Firefox and Thunderbird are shared. This means I can login to Linux and read all the email that is on my Windows machine, and use the same Firefox bookmarks.
I would definitely recommend doing a clean install on a separate hard drive if you want to share a computer with Linux. I shudder to think what damage I might have caused to my Windows XP installation had I attempted to put openSUSE on the same hard drive. Thank heavens I did not do that. This way, if one of my hard drives fails, I have a working operating system ready to go. Not bad.
The moral of the story: Don’t assume that a Linux distribution is more stable or bug-free just because a corporation is backing it.
P.S. The environmental bonus in all of this is: If you want to run a new operating system, you don’t have to get a new computer, just get a new hard drive. Less waste, right? Now if we could only have dual hard drive laptops…
I love technology but I am also quite aware of the negative impact it can have on the environment. Still, I think it's technology that has the most potential to save us. Here you'll find articles on the green tech aka clean tech, such as alternative fuel, green computing, and e-cycling. You'll also hear about the "green" and the "tech" - from green household cleaners to why Linux is the progressive operating system of choice.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:24 am
“Now if we could only have dual hard drive laptops”
the energy demand of the disks would be twice : the inner side of the laptop would get hotter, thus leading, in some circumstances, to less reliable HW (I have a 3 yrs old laptop which has half broken connectivity because it was too hot before I could fix it)….
Another solution would be a laptop
without
classical HD inside it (ex: the OLPC and the eeeeeeeePC) and the classical (magnetic, now very cheap if new, with big capacity and known life expectancy) disks outside it, where they can get as hot as they want without damaging anything else : modern BIOSs can boot on the USB, and many Linux can be installed on such disks or on USB pendrives ( TinyMe for PCLOS, Arch made one this month or gave an how-to, Mandriva has done it for years -began in 2004-, and I may forget hundred of them….) .
This solution ,as many outside disks outside the laptop can make him less hot, can increase the laptop’s life expectancy, but need being plugged to reliable main power supply…