I’ve just finished work on a dual-boot setup guide with Linux and Windows 7. It covers setting up Dual Boot with Windows installed first or second, and with Linux installed first and second, and covers Linux distros that default to using LVM, such as Fedora, and those which don’t default to using LVM, such as Debian.
Link here:
Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.
In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva – none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.
I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.
Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.
Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.
So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D
Cause: Faulty 2GB memory
This is a very useful boot disk - it allows you to download the latest network installer from the relevant site and boot it, without having to burn or create another stick. It supports the major distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Scientific Linux, CentOS and Slackware.
Be warned, though, Network Installers by nature can be heavily console-based.
Yep, just confirmed Google Movies now also works. Picked a relatively cheap purchase (£2) to test with.
I’ve finished copying my files over onto my Debian installation and I just now need to reconfigure everything. My Fitbit is now syncing in Debian happily. BOINC is installed (but not configured) and I’ve installed LXDE so I can take off KDE.
And DRM finally works!
I managed to install Debian again today. This time I used my DVDs which meant I didn’t actually have to download anything off the repositories which could run into the problems mentioned in my previous posts here and here.
And, I was able to install extra software in the same way, including KDE, and again, without having to download from repos. Finally, I used netmirror-apt to update my sources list with the fastest repositories to me.
I still need to copy across my files, and run some configuration, but I should be back onto Debian within the next week or so.
I’m back on Fedora at the moment, with my Debian install backed up as a CloneZilla image.
Well, all three Debian DVDs are now downloaded and burned. Just need to have some time to try my install again…
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“109”]
Debian OpenLogo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]
Today, I decided to try reverting my laptop to Debian, having imaged it yesterday to provide a rollback option in case something went wrong.
The installation (via Net Install) took absolutely ages, but was pretty much successful. Then I got reminded why I stopped using Debian originally – the Unity style interface. It really winds me up. Then I was surprised by just how long it took to download updates. I usually get a throughput of between 100kb/s and 400kb/s depending on what and where I’m downloading from. I was getting around 20kb/s downloading from ftp.uk.debian.org and downloading the KDE package, apt-get was estimating 6 HOURS to finish downloading, and that’s not including the installing. I even used the tool netselect-apt to pick the fastest mirrors, and it still didn’t improve. I’m going to try again once I’ve downloaded and burned all the Debian DVD images. Maybe I might be able to select the packages and go straight to KDE without using the Unity-like interface.
On the plus side, I checked the DRM test video via Adobe’s web site and I was able to confirm that it works fine and I was able to view DRM protected material in Debian after downloading the hal package, so whatever happens, I’ll at least be able to use Google Movies now.
I might also take a look at openSuSE and see what that’s like. Hey, have to keep my options open. :-)