Once I grew my hair out I couldn’t resist the urge to headbang like a maniac at metal shows. Can’t beat seeing Cannibal Corpse and Mayhem a couple months back… That was insane. Moshing and banging, probably the best concert I’ve ever seen
I tried Linux and all the keybinding was a lot of fun, I gotta do it more with windows. I built my own specialized keyboard for inputting chords when I’m writing lyric sheets and I set CTRL+Tab as the keybind to switch between that and QWERTY.
It’s always a heartwarming experience seeing someone passionate about a subject enough that they’d be willing to dedicate what was likely at least twenty minutes of their own free time to writing a detailed response to a stranger on the internet.
re: /dev/sda haberdashery
Your explanation was very helpful in explaining the process by which the BIOS is loaded. As I’ve continued to work on Ubuntu, I’ve been trying to hammer out little errors along the way and I believe that I inadvertently identified the problem with my dual-booting situation before. Whenever I load Linux, the system will load that ubiquitous screen where it does a filesystem check, etc, and I always get two errors: (1) VMX (outside TXT) disabled…; (2) ima: error communicating with TPM. I went into the BIOS and figured out how to turn the TPM on, and when I did so… what do you know, I started boot-looping again, just as before. Apparently I’m going to have to do a bit of troubleshooting to get Linux operable with the TPM, if I care enough about it to just undo a simple error message on boot-up that has no impact on my actual computing experience. But having his TPM chip before was causing boot-looping, perhaps due to a security issue with grubx, who knows, but for the time being I’m putting it on the back-burner.
re: Musescore
I appreciate the thought, and yes Musescore has been on my periphery a good percentage of my 15 years of using notation software. Musescore is an admirable project and I’m impressed with the steps its taken in the last few updates. Frankly, this has probably been the fourth or fifth time now that someone has hocked Musescore as a FOSS alternative to Finale, and while I get it, they are not truly one-to-one in compatibility, at least not yet. Finale is a boutique program, designed for professional use and it’s very feature-rich, especially as one gets into more specialized concerns in terms of unusual notations, etc. Finale works just fine on my system and I don’t intend on changing away from it anytime soon. I’ve been using it for so many years, it’s like second-nature to me. I couldn’t imagine dropping a software I spent hundreds of dollars on now for something else if I still get great mileage out of it.
re: Arch Linux
Following the last time you and I communicated, I actually saw a video from SomeOrdinaryGamers where Muta did a step-by-step installation of Arch on a new machine. It certainly seems more complex than Ubuntu, but at the same time, boy does it give you a rich experience in learning the intricacies of your system and how everything functions together. I am definitely going to be keeping Ubuntu on my main system for the time being, but I do have a blank ZBook15 gen 2 (I believe it has Mint on it right now? I haven’t opened it in a few months…) and I might have a go at installing Arch on it and messing around for a while.
My current project is going to be taking my secondary HDD, which is only a storage device now, and configuring its file structure to be easier to use with Linux, as well as clearing out all the legacy OS files from when it used to have Windows on it. I’ve been having trouble using utilities like rm -rf because for some reason, some files will delete with no issue, but then others will actually cause the drive to crash in some spectacular fashion, and I have to sudo umount -l then remount again with ntfs-3g just to get back to it. I can’t tell if its a permissions issue or something else. I know the drive is old and there are four damaged sectors, but the most recent SMART test didn’t seem to throw up any major red flags. I can delete individual problem files, but trying to delete a bulk quantity runs into issues at times. It’s weird. I don’t exactly want to format the drive because there’s ~0.9TB of personal files on there (that are all backed up both on a cloud service and an external SSD, no worries!), but so far I’m having fun learning some new commands.
Yes, I am aware of how the partition naming structure works, to a degree. I am going off the fact that when I installed Ubuntu, it was installed on a partition (sda2) rather than a primary drive (sda). I’ve read that when GRUB is installed, if it gets installed to /dev/sda2 rather than /dev/sda it can cause issues with dual booting as the BIOS will read in a sequential order, and it may miss a partition if it’s “far enough down the list”. As another example, you may be in for some trouble if grubx.efi is installed on /dev/sda8 or something.
Everything gets installed into a partition on a drive.
I guess I must have gotten my preconceptions wrong, or perhaps I misread something. From my impression, certain things can be installed on the primary drive such as boot loaders, but I could be wrong.
If you don’t mind me asking, what software are you wanting/needing to use?
Finale 2012c is the main software I needed. And by funnies I mostly just mean that it’s slow to update graphics, but the program works entirely as intended. MIDI drivers work, sound libraries (Garritan and ARIA Player) function, print to PDF is fine, I’m actually incredibly impressed! I’m using WINE 8.0.1.
I also wouldn’t mind trying to get Cakewalk running, as my workflow is definitely more attuned to that software, but maybe trying to get all the proprietary drivers (e.g. TASCAM’s interface drivers) to work with Linux may be more headache than its worth.
Arch
I’ve heard it can be pretty challenging to get into Arch, is this true? I don’t know if I’ll ever be a “script kiddie” as it were. I plan on getting good at using bash and learning the other ones like ssh, but I don’t know how much I like the idea of having to hand-craft my OS from bare metal.
Thank you for the breakdown. I’ve learned a fair bit about the infrastructure of my computer and Linux since posting this, and I’m now dedicated Ubuntu with only needing to do some very minor work with WINE here and there in the last two weeks or so. Linux has been a blast and learning about everything has been a lot of fun so far.
My problem turned out to be something with the BIOS. I don’t know if a switch got flipped somewhere along the way or what, but when I reset the BIOS to factory default settings in the boot menu I no longer had issues with boot looping and a CPU I could fry an egg on.
I do believe that GRUB was initially installed on sda2 and not sda, and Windows was just taking precidence over grubx64.efi upon startup. Now that I’ve scrubbed windows from my PC I no longer have any issues booting up and my PC seems to run just about the same as before, less a few graphical funnies with some larger proprietary software I use.
Funny enough, I tried to do a clean install of Debian with KDE on my system and I went back to having boot issues, mainly where it would just open to GRUB CL and I couldn’t get it to initialize Debian, when I was certain it was a good install. So I’m just going to stick to Ubuntu for a good while and learn it. Once I feel very confident in filesystem maintenance, command line navigation, snap/flatpak/.deb/whatever, all the major things, I’ll start shopping around for another distro again. Ubuntu has been treating me very nicely though.
Hrm, I’m not sure how you are going about your installation procedure. You mentioned that you are installing Ubuntu, but Ubuntu should come with Grub pre packaged. Installing Ubuntu really only requires clicking a couple buttons in the install wizard.
I had Linux installed on a tertiary partition of a secondary drive, my F: drive. I neglected to store it within the dedicated SSD, C:, and I believe that GRUB was just not being picked up because instead of being sda or something close to it, it was instead sda6.
Further this with the fact that GRUB seemed to not have elevated permissions and when I eventually got into its command line, it was not able to run Linux for reasons I’m unaware. Windows BIOS menu never had Linux or any corollary term available as a boot order item, and only through digging through the Boot from EFI item and submenus was I able to find anything to actually boot Ubuntu without live CD at all. grubx.efi (or whatever it was called) black screened.
Im not really familiar with shim, but, from what I understand, it’s the loader for when you have secure boot enabled, but you should have that disabled.
Scout’s honor, I really did disable Secure Boot. I did so through Shell. I did so in the Windows directory. I even triple checked that it was disabled through the BIOS menu. If shimx64.efi is only supposed to work when Secure Boot is disabled, that must be because Windows has just been acting screwy as all get out.
Internal HDD has F: (storage) and a partition for Ubuntu, which is the A: drive in Windows and /dev/sda3 in Linux.
I was originally hoping to do it this way and be able to dual boot them, but the more I think about it the more I feel that just going straight to Linux and biting the bullet would be better in the long run, and I can flash Windows if I really need it.
I was trying to get GRUB to act as boot loader but for the longest time I couldn’t even get GRUB running, even with at least 5 different troubleshooting ideas. Then once it was running, I still couldn’t get it to mount the EFI. Then I started getting the boot loop issues and Windows OS stopped working, but I figured out how to get Linux desktop running via shimx64.efi in the BIOS boot loader.
This computer is natively a Win 10 machine, and I was trying to add Linux to it.