Dual Booting my PC... What Linux distro?

[Afasoas]

I'm thinking about dual-booting my Win 8.1 desktop PC with 'nix. Just wanted to start a bit of a discussion on what distro might be best?

At the minute I've got an ailing Win 7 laptop which is a bit choc-full with utilities for everything from monitoring IP traffic, running virtual machines (VMWare player) through to recovering SD cards. It also runs Lightroom and Photoshop, but I only ever use them when I'm in a bind. I use it for authoring websites, diagnosing network problems, checking email and producing documents.


It'd make sense to put some of that stuff onto the desktop too, but I'd rather keep my Win 8.1 install nice and clean and dual boot it with Linux.
I have played with Linux flavours at both ends of the spectrum, Ubuntu and Gentoo.


I don't like the Ubuntu default window manager. And it never really feels that slick no matter what hardware it's running on.
I prefer the UI in Lubuntu but it's basic and doesn't feel intuitive.

Gentoo - I've only used it in anger without X and even on netbook it feels fairly rapid, but installation is involved. Ironing out some of the dependencies in the source tree has been on occasion a PITA, as is compiling from source all the time. That said, compilation will probably be much much faster on the desktop PC. And I intend to use it with X on a second netbook for writing blogs and dealing with email on the move - but I'll install/configure that when I've a decent time slot on my hands.


What distro would you recommend and why?
Is there something that fits nicely in the middle?

[Kim]

I use Debian, because it's a lean Debian-like (what I know best) distro with squillions of packages, support for every architecture known to man, and a release cycle that suits my circular tuit availability.  I fail at Ubuntu because I put off updates for fear that something important will break, then the release becomes unsupported.

Choice of desktop environment may or may not be tightly enforced by a given distro.  There's certainly potential for installing [multiple] alternatives on pretty much anything, with varying degrees of effort.

I'm currently using MATE (a fork of Gnome 2, for a functional but low-bling desktop environment) on my desktop and LXDE (leaner and meaner) on the ageing netbook.  Both are running Debian Wheezy.  MATE still has some bugs, but they're less annoying than current incarnations of Gnome.

I've never bothered with Gentoo.  I see the appeal of the philosophy, but life's too short for all that compiling.

[woollypigs]

I have used Ubuntu since 6.4 and have liked it a lot. Over the years it went from not liking my dual monitor setup to finding it upon install. Since 11.10 I have felt like I'm not getting what my laptop can give me. So I tried xubuntu, lubuntu(do really like this distro our small 10" laptop) but it still didn't fell right. I gave Mint a go, with MATE and LXDE, better but I didn't feel at home.

Then I gave crunchbang (#!) and I feel it feels much faster and stable, the 4 year old laptop does feel like a new one now. Booted up, with the odd programs running I'm clocking up easy 1Gb less RAM than before and my CPU don't cook so often, now hovering about 15-20% where before easy close to 40%. The best part is that it found my graphic card, the extra monitor and my wifi card right out of the box, where other distros have always played up. OK, #! did take the ball home the other day and I had to re-install, but I was poking around in places that I don't know much about.

#! is closer to Debian Wheezy than any of the other *buntu's.

[Kim]

I have a lot of time for Ubuntu.  For all their irritating reinvention of Gnome with every release habits, Ubuntu is what made Linux usable as a desktop OS for non-experts (Microsoft then finished the job by making Windows less usable than Ubuntu).  It's still the one I'd go for if I wanted up to date drivers and multimedia stuff to Just Work.  There's a lot of nice stuff there, but too much bling for my tastes.

[woollypigs]

Totally agree with you there, Kim.

[pcolbeck]

Arch is in the middle. Good package manager like Debian based distributions but cutting edge like Gentoo without the need to compile anything (so long as the package is in the main repositaries).
It's las light weight as you want it to be and it doesn't have a preferred window manager just choose what you want. They also don't customise packages so if you install KDE you get vanilla KDE with no special Arch addons or logos etc. It's not a one click install though you will have to edit text files etc.

[Afasoas]

There's some great food for thought here with quite a few different options on the table.
Thanks muchly.

I'll weigh things up and let you know how it goes!

[Afasoas]

It's official. I'm almost in-love with Crunchbang. I've managed to create invoices in LibreOffice (by opening and amending an existing Excel spreadsheet), export it as a .pdf and print it. The Netbook feels much faster than it ever did with Lubuntu 12.03. I've actually started looking at Chromebooks with 11" screens as the lack of screen real estate is the only limiting factor now.

Anyway, I've just discovered darktable - a Linux equivalent of Lightroom and I'm keen to give it a go.
I'm wondering about running Crunchbang on the desktop but I've a couple of reservations.

I really like the feature in Windows where you can hit the windows key (or super key) and start typing an application or file name, hit enter and your application/document opens up. I also miss right clicking on a taskbar application to close it, but that's no biggy.

I appreciate Openbox is basic lightweight desktop and I really do appreciate that simplicity on the netbook. Are there any recommended alternatives that work well with Crunchbang? Or is it better to look to another distro?

Cheers

[woollypigs]

I have used #! for a few months now on my main laptop with a 19" screen next to it. Works brilliantly, it is very easy to custom it up to your liking. The only thing I that nags me, is that when you install a new program, you have to manually add it to the menu, and I keep forgetting how to do it between installations of various software.

Else is #! very good, solid and stable and fast. Though for some reason chrome has become very slow and CPU hungry, though not RAM hungry at it was on Ubuntu. Running inkscape and gimp at the same time and the laptop feels nice and fast. At boot up I'm 800-1000Mb RAM down compared to Ubuntu which is good on a 3Gb laptop. CPU usage idling with some programs open is about 14-18% where Ubuntu it was over 40% without programs open.

[Afasoas]

I'm posting this from Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' from my (now) dual booting desktop.

Microsoft have made evaluation copies of their software available (including older/still widely used versions such as Win Server 2008/Windows 7) so my next job is to create a series of virtualised boxen so I can learn about AD and AD replication etc. etc. in skilling up for the new job.

Is Virtual Box the best tool for the job or should I be looking at something else? It would be nice to have snapshotting as an option.


Anyway, main reason for posting back here was to share some of my experience. Dual booting Win 8.1 and Linux on a UEFI PC is not as straight forward as just installing Linux and letting it take care of itself.

Steps:
1 ) Shrink Windows volume to create some space - I used Windows' in-built disk management
2 ) Download Linux ISO
3 ) I used Rufus to create a bootable USB stick from the ISO - it's portable and fast
4 ) Disable secure boot (bios) -theoretically should be able to switch it back on now
5 ) Enable CSM (bios) - the only way I could get live USB to boot
6 ) Boot from live USB
7 ) Start install from live desktop environment
Existing operating system not detected, manually create partitions for new OS using unallocated space (~20-30 GB ext4 partition for root -'/', swap-file partition - 1-2x memory, remaining space allocated to ext4 partition for /home)
9 ) Complete the install
10 ) Remove Live USB and reboot PC - it loads into Windows
11 ) Followed these instructions for installing rEFInd: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#windows
12 ) Reboot PC - it still loads into Windows
13 ) Reinsert Live USB and re-boot from it
14 ) Create /boot/EFI mount point
15 ) Using parted, find EFI boot partition and mount it on /boot/EFI - this was tricky with the RAID configuration in my machine - I had to mount something under /dev/mapper/isw_gefhdchgdWin8
16 ) cd to /boot/EFI
17 ) Follow these instructions http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#manual_renaming (for /EFI/Microsoft/Boot)
18 ) Reboot - hey presto, it works!

Quite a lot of nail bighting in working that out. bcdedit in Windows and efibootmgr in Linux didn't work for me as the Lenovo K430 UEFI bios is hard coded to boot from EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi

Confusingly there is also an EFI/Boot manager but the UEFI implementation on this machine seems to ignore that.
I'll blog it properly at some point and try and save someone else the pain.

[Afasoas]

So just before i went to bed, I tried a few tweaks and seemingly broke it

Using Synaptic* I uninstalled Firefox and installed Chromium, Evolution and Virtual Box. That seemed to go okay.
I started up Chromium and started downloading a few innocuous ISOs and left the machine running.

This morning, the machine was in a crashed state. Black screen. Mouse cursor. No response from either stomping on keys or doing anything with the mouse.

When I try and reboot into Mint, it never gets as far as a login prompt. First two goes, I get a long delay after it's loaded USB HID devices, and then it continues starting up, only to stop for a very long-time at "*Restoring Resolver State". Then it sort of gives up and tries again repeating teh same cycle a few times.

And on the latest attempt, I'm just staring at a black screen.

What can/do I do?





*I couldn't get Software Manager to actually 'do' anything - clicking on a package after a search, it still showed just the package summary instead of showing you more details and an install/uninstall button)

[ian]

Linux, eh? You'd think Microsoft had invented it to make Windows look easy.

#conspiracy

[Afasoas]

That sounds like a very good plan!

Okay, I've fixed it with the help of these two articles:

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/842
http://www.howopensource.com/2012/10/install-nvidia-geforce-driver-in-ubuntu-12-10-12-04-using-ppa/

[GraemeMcC]

blimey!

I downloaded a Mint ISO to a laptop, after having sorted the bittorrent software, etc, then simply burned the Mint OS onto DVD then booted the (old XP) deskie from that.
Works a treat, provided I remember to stay by the "on switch" if I need to boot into XP.
The demo found enough partition space to load into. Only needs about 8Gb.

Now that I'm sussing out how linux runs, I'll re-partition the 2 HDDs so that I have separated linux OS, /home and /swap partitions, with my XP OS, pagesys and backup partitions alongside shared music / photos / docs volumes.  OS files on master HDD, pagesys/swap files on the other, and doc's shared over the remaining 400GB or so...

Should have done this years ago!