A very fair decision! Dual booting can be a huge pain, and, for the average user, it really isn’t all that necessary anymore – Linux has come a very long way!
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.
Interesting. I’m curious what the setting was. But, I’m glad that it worked out for you in the end!
I do believe that GRUB was initially installed on sda2 and not sda
I refer back to my previous comment – sda2 refers to a partition on the drive named sda. You could have a drive sda, sdb, sdc, etc. If one was given some partition sdc3 that means it is partition 3 on drive sdc. Everything gets installed into a partition on a drive.
Windows was just taking precidence over grubx64.efi upon startup
This can certainly happen – especially if Windows is installed after Linux. I woud refer you to this answer to fix it.
less a few graphical funnies with some larger proprietary software I use.
Yeah, I’m not too surprised about that (depending on the speicfic graphical issues that you are referring to, mind you) – especially if you are using Wine. If you don’t mind me asking, what software are you wanting/needing to 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.
Hm, this is strange. I would err on the side of a layer 8 error, but there could certainly be some other fuckery afoot.
So I’m just going to stick to Ubuntu for a good while and learn it.
There’s no problem with that! Ubuntu was the first distro that I used, as well, when I first got into Linux. Granted, I didn’t stick with Ubuntu for long, cause I got mildly annoyed with how it worked.
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.
Sounds like a solid plan! When you do decide to move on from Ubuntu, I’d recommend Arch LInux 😜
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.
First of all sda refers to a physical drive, whereas sda6 refers to a partition on that drive. As for the rest of it, I’m not exactly sure what you are talking about – it doesn’t really matter where in your system Linux is installed; the bootloader probes for an OS, and, once found, will update its table with the position of the OS on the drive.
Further this with the fact that GRUB seemed to not have elevated permissions
This statement doesn’t really make sense; Grub runs independently of Linux (it even loads before initramfs), so the concept of “execution privelege” doesn’t apply. (source)
when I eventually got into its command line, it was not able to run Linux for reasons I’m unaware.
I will point you to this answer, if you wish to boot linux from the Grub command line.
Windows BIOS
There’s no such thing (well, as far as I’m aware, anyways – maybe a microsoft surface, or the like, labels it as such 😜). The BIOS is contained within a physical chip on the device’s motherboard.
Windows BIOS menu never had Linux or any corollary term available as a boot order item
If you’re talking abou the boot menu, it doesn’t necessarily have to list the linux distro. If you know what drive it is installed on, you select that, then the BIOS finds the bootloader from there. A boot device is just that – a device to boot from, not an OS to boot into.
I really did disable Secure Boot. I did so through Shell.
I don’t understand what you mean here. As far as I’m aware, secure boot is only able to be disabled within the BIOS.
I was unsure if maybe there was some alternative command line trickery that exists to modify it that I am unaware of, but a quick websearch seems to corroborate my pre existing belief.
Windows has just been acting screwy as all get out.
This is an unfortunate reality of dual booting with Windows. Windows can do all sorts of trickery on your system (even when the system is powered down!). If I want to boot Windows (I keep it installed on a separate, dedicated, and air-gapped drive), I plug in its drive, and disconnect all other drives related to Linux. This has been the most reliable method that I have found to dual boot Windows. However, this method is still not without possible issue, as Windows can still leave devices in weird states that end up messing with how they are used in Linux.
The fact that it’s a “single board” computer, specifically, is mildly irrelevant, imo; just follow standard backup practices. The only way the type of computer really comes into question is whether or not it has adequate resources to run whatever backup solution that you choose. For my usecase, Borg works great, but choose whatever solution fits your requirements. The “simplest”, and lightest solution is probably rsync, but that may leave a lot to be desired.
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.
It is certainly possible to dual boot (in my experience, with the occasional headache that you may, or may not be willing to deal with) Windows and Linux, but yes, the most reliable installation would be one, or the other.
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
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.
but I figured out how to get Linux desktop running via shimx64.efi in the BIOS boot loader.
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.
I don’t fully understand how you are going about your installation. Are you attempting to install Windows 10, and Ubuntu onto different partitions on one drive, or each on a separate drive? Are you wanting to use grub to boot the OS of choice, or to choose the boot device from the BIOS boot device menu? In what order did you initially install the OS’s (Windows 10 first, then Ubuntu, or vice-versa)?
The issue, I think, is that having access to a user’s entire listening history could very well be used to identify that user – one’s full listening history is likely to be rather unique.
That’s a fair point that I had not considered – it’s a shortcoming in the premise of my inquiry. I wonder if it’s possible, if at all, to create any recommendation service that doesn’t compromise on user privacy. It may not be, as it would require a user’s history, which, given enough entries, can be used to identify them.