After the glowing reviews of Linux Mint I decided to give it a whirl and
downloaded the MATE iso. For some reason my standby, rufus, didn't create
a bootable thumb drive. The directions on the homepage said to use etcher.
Okay, I downloaded it and it did work.

I booted into the live session with no problem and set up the wifi
connection. So far so good. I played with it for a little bit. It would
work but I didn't see any real compelling reason to use it but figured I'd
give it a chance.

'Install Linux Mint' started off in the usual manner. Then it got to the
point of 'erase everything or do something else' and I selected do
something else since I wanted a dual boot with the Fedora instance. The
next screen showed sda with some partitions but also said 'No OS detected'

WTF. Research time. It seems there is a utility called os-prober that they
decided to disable by default in Mint 22 for 'security reasons'. It also
said the decision was controversial. No shit. One page also suggested dual
boot was so 2020 and it's so much better to just run in a VM.

More research for Fedora/Mint dual boot. Oh, wonderful. Fedora 40 uses
btrfs for the boot partition and Mint doesn't do btrfs so the Mint grub
can't be set up for Fedora. There followed a complex procedure where you
had to make sure the machine came up in Fedora since you could configure
its grub to see Mint. It hinted if you screwed up it might only come up
in Mint or, worst case, be bricked.

My takeaway is if you have an old Windows box and want to doa scorched
earth install Mint will work otherwise it doesn't play well with others.
I've got the iso so maybe I'll set it up under Fedora with VirtualBox but
that leaves the burning question, why?

On 12 Aug 2024 00:07:58 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> For some reason my standby, rufus, didn't create a bootable thumb
> drive.

Dimdows trouble?

Normally dd works fine.

On 12 Aug 2024 00:07:58 GMT, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote in
<lht22tFcf1vU1@mid.individual.net>:

> After the glowing reviews of Linux Mint I decided to give it a whirl and
> downloaded the MATE iso. For some reason my standby, rufus, didn't
> create
> a bootable thumb drive. The directions on the homepage said to use
> etcher.
> Okay, I downloaded it and it did work.
>
> I booted into the live session with no problem and set up the wifi
> connection. So far so good. I played with it for a little bit. It would
> work but I didn't see any real compelling reason to use it but figured
> I'd
> give it a chance.
>
> 'Install Linux Mint' started off in the usual manner. Then it got to the
> point of 'erase everything or do something else' and I selected do
> something else since I wanted a dual boot with the Fedora instance. The
> next screen showed sda with some partitions but also said 'No OS
> detected'
>
> WTF. Research time. It seems there is a utility called os-prober that
> they
> decided to disable by default in Mint 22 for 'security reasons'. It also
> said the decision was controversial. No shit. One page also suggested
> dual
> boot was so 2020 and it's so much better to just run in a VM.

The wife's gaming machine came pre-installed with Windows. I
put Mint 21.3 on it, and Windows appears in grub.

Thank you for the heads-up about Mint 22 having that issue; I use Mint
because I don't want to fuss with such nonsense, and it looks like they
are adding nonsense to the distro. I have yet to move to Mint 22, not
seeing the need. (A quick lookup claims EOL for 21.3 is April of 2027.)

> More research for Fedora/Mint dual boot. Oh, wonderful. Fedora 40 uses
> btrfs for the boot partition and Mint doesn't do btrfs so the Mint grub
> can't be set up for Fedora. There followed a complex procedure where you
> had to make sure the machine came up in Fedora since you could configure
> its grub to see Mint. It hinted if you screwed up it might only come up
> in Mint or, worst case, be bricked.

This sounds very weird. I don't even set up a separate /boot
on my installations anymore, those files can live just fine in
the /boot directory of the root filesystem. And if you run grub-mkconfig
while booted in Mint 21.3, it should detect the Windows partition as well
as Fedora. Grub can be controlled from whichever Linux installation you
like -- for example, you could install Mint (but not touch the
bootloader), then boot to Fedora and run os-prober over there to see if
it detects the Mint installation. If so, you can run grub-mkconfig, which
will emit to stdout a suitable grub.cfg, so:

# grub-mkconfig > /tmp/looksee.txt
# less -c /tmp/looksee.txt

> My takeaway is if you have an old Windows box and want to doa scorched
> earth install Mint will work otherwise it doesn't play well with others.
> I've got the iso so maybe I'll set it up under Fedora with VirtualBox
> but
> that leaves the burning question, why?

The reason I use Mint is better support for codecs, drivers, and so forth.
I used to run Fedora, but stopped when I discovered they were removing
code for ellipical-curve cryptography from openssl in their SRPM...on
(bad) advice from Red Hat legal. I decided I'd have enough of those
clowns, and jumped ship. (The whole Fedora+rpmfusion thing always bugged
me anyway.)

--
-v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti
OS: Linux 6.11.0-rc2 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G

vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> wrote:

>Thank you for the heads-up about Mint 22 having that issue; I use Mint
>because I don't want to fuss with such nonsense, and it looks like they
>are adding nonsense to the distro. I have yet to move to Mint 22, not
>seeing the need. (A quick lookup claims EOL for 21.3 is April of 2027.)

You certainly have time with 21.x. I could've kept it. But I'm more
willing to adapt distro-wise than to do that, I guess.

--
Joel W. Crump

Amendment XIV
Section 1.

[...] No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.

Dobbs rewrites this, it is invalid precedent. States are
liable for denying needed abortions, e.g. TX.

On Mon, 12 Aug 2024 16:01:43 -0400, Joel wrote:

> vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> wrote:
>
>>Thank you for the heads-up about Mint 22 having that issue; I use Mint
>>because I don't want to fuss with such nonsense, and it looks like they
>>are adding nonsense to the distro. I have yet to move to Mint 22, not
>>seeing the need. (A quick lookup claims EOL for 21.3 is April of 2027.)
>
>
> You certainly have time with 21.x. I could've kept it. But I'm more
> willing to adapt distro-wise than to do that, I guess.

Another Mint gotcha. I wanted to use balena-etcher to clone sda to sdb and
since I had the Mint MATE stick, I booted into Mint, downloaded the deb
package, and tried to install it. No go. The Cinnamon spin may have worked
but MATE marches to its own drummer and didn't have some of the
dependecies.

Back to the drawing board. I downloaded the CloneZilla Live iso, used
etcher on the Windows laptop to overwrite the Mint stick, and booted it.
The device to device worked with no problems, even fixing up the boot
sequence so it comes up on the SSD which was my original intent. I'd been
meaning to do that for some tiem and finally got roundtoit.

On 12 Aug 2024 22:28:10 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> I wanted to use balena-etcher to clone sda to sdb ...

I normally just use rsync to do bulk copies of filesystems.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>On 12 Aug 2024 00:07:58 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>
>> For some reason my standby, rufus, didn't create a bootable thumb
>> drive.
>
>Dimdows trouble?
>
>Normally dd works fine.

I used Rufus to make my Mint installer USB media, but I overwrote that
with the same installer with Mint's USB writing software, just to make
the file system entirely Linux. But that was eventually overwritten
by openSUSE Leap.

--
Joel W. Crump

Amendment XIV
Section 1.

[...] No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.

Dobbs rewrites this, it is invalid precedent. States are
liable for denying needed abortions, e.g. TX.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Mon, 12 Aug 2024 16:01:43 -0400, Joel wrote:
>
>> vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> wrote:
>>
>>>Thank you for the heads-up about Mint 22 having that issue; I use Mint
>>>because I don't want to fuss with such nonsense, and it looks like they
>>>are adding nonsense to the distro. I have yet to move to Mint 22, not
>>>seeing the need. (A quick lookup claims EOL for 21.3 is April of 2027.)
>>
>>
>> You certainly have time with 21.x. I could've kept it. But I'm more
>> willing to adapt distro-wise than to do that, I guess.
>
> Another Mint gotcha. I wanted to use balena-etcher to clone sda to sdb and
> since I had the Mint MATE stick, I booted into Mint, downloaded the deb
> package, and tried to install it. No go. The Cinnamon spin may have worked
> but MATE marches to its own drummer and didn't have some of the
> dependecies.
>
> Back to the drawing board. I downloaded the CloneZilla Live iso, used
> etcher on the Windows laptop to overwrite the Mint stick, and booted it.
> The device to device worked with no problems, even fixing up the boot
> sequence so it comes up on the SSD which was my original intent. I'd been
> meaning to do that for some tiem and finally got roundtoit.

What's wrong with dd?

--
Blow it out your ear.

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 07:27:14 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> What's wrong with dd?

Drive Destroyer? Nothing other than it makes me nervous.

rbowman wrote:

> Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> What's wrong with dd?
>
> Drive Destroyer? Nothing other than it makes me nervous.

8)

--
"The only people who 'hate' me in COLA are those who get upset when I
point out their logical fallacies and untruths." - lying asshole
"-hh", lying shamelessly

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 07:27:14 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> What's wrong with dd?
>
> Drive Destroyer? Nothing other than it makes me nervous.

Heh, I used it to clone a whole Windows XP installation and convert it to a
virtual machine. Don't ask for details, it's been too many years.

It's also useful for making bootable USB sticks.

--
You seek to shield those you love and you like the role of the provider.

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:48:48 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>
>> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 07:27:14 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>>
>>> What's wrong with dd?
>>
>> Drive Destroyer? Nothing other than it makes me nervous.
>
> Heh, I used it to clone a whole Windows XP installation and convert it
> to a virtual machine. Don't ask for details, it's been too many years.
>
> It's also useful for making bootable USB sticks.

As I get older and am prone to Joe Biden moments I like things simple
where I'm not going to screw up if and of or /dev/sda with /dev/tty37 or
something.

CloneZilla is like one of those assisted suicide machines. After the
device to device setup you have to answer Yes three times to "Do ytou know
what you're doing and is this what you really want?"

With dd after the Oh shit moment it's ^c ^c ^c ^c but you're probably
already screwed. I'm not even sure ^C will interrupt it.

dd shyness is the reason for my habit of downloading isos onto a Windows
machine and using rufus or now, etcher. I'm damn sure there's nothing
fragile on D:\ since I'm not in the habit of partitioning and creating a
D: drive. IT used to do that on the machines they set up and C: invariably
turned out to be too small.

On 15 Aug 2024 02:53:04 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> CloneZilla is like one of those assisted suicide machines. After the
> device to device setup you have to answer Yes three times to "Do ytou
> know what you're doing and is this what you really want?"

The inevitable result is “confirmation fatigue”.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:48:48 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>>
>>> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 07:27:14 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>>>
>>>> What's wrong with dd?
>>>
>>> Drive Destroyer? Nothing other than it makes me nervous.
>>
>> Heh, I used it to clone a whole Windows XP installation and convert it
>> to a virtual machine. Don't ask for details, it's been too many years.
>>
>> It's also useful for making bootable USB sticks.
>
> As I get older and am prone to Joe Biden moments I like things simple
> where I'm not going to screw up if and of or /dev/sda with /dev/tty37 or
> something.
>
> CloneZilla is like one of those assisted suicide machines. After the
> device to device setup you have to answer Yes three times to "Do ytou know
> what you're doing and is this what you really want?"
>
> With dd after the Oh shit moment it's ^c ^c ^c ^c but you're probably
> already screwed. I'm not even sure ^C will interrupt it.

So are you more afraid of sharks or being electrocuted? :-)

> dd shyness is the reason for my habit of downloading isos onto a Windows
> machine and using rufus or now, etcher. I'm damn sure there's nothing
> fragile on D:\ since I'm not in the habit of partitioning and creating a
> D: drive. IT used to do that on the machines they set up and C: invariably
> turned out to be too small.

I once did "rm -rf *" from the wrong directory. So now I measure twice (or
more) and cut once.

--
You will be winged by an anti-aircraft battery.

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 06:42:09 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> So are you more afraid of sharks or being electrocuted?

Sharks are damn rare in Montana so... I'm not afraid of lightning but my
brother-in-law won the 'struck by lightning' lottery so I respect it.
Statistically very rare but when you're the smoking pile in the
campground... There are supposed to be thunderstorms this afternoon so
I'll take the vehicle with the roof and windows. People have been killed
on motorcycles by lightning. In eastern Montana a guy on a bike tends to
be the highest point around; prairie dogs aren't that tall.

> I once did "rm -rf *" from the wrong directory. So now I measure twice
> (or more) and cut once.

AIX has a /usr/lpp that sounds pretty harmless. One of our programmers
deleted it trying to free up space. It's where all the optional installed
programs. He bought doughnuts.

At one point I wondered how you could fill a 10 MB HDD. At that point we
were up to 4 GB drives and it still was a constant struggle to find room.
Today,

Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 2G 1G 2G 1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2 457G 80G 354G 19% /

80G and I don't have a bunch of photos, jpegs, mp3s etc. The Fedora box
has a TB SSD. How will I ever fill that up? Nevermind.... So far I only
have used 19G but I don't have the whole source tree on it.