mrmazda: DFSee: A superb tool that seems much underused..

You can boot an ISO file directly from Grub. This allows multiple ISOs to be present on any drive/flashdrive. One of my test laptops has more than a dozen ISOs available to boot from for demo/testing purposes.

Normally, if specific hardware support is added for a device (say in kernel version 4.2.3) then it's reasonable to assume that any kernel version after this will also have the same or possibly better support for the same hardware device.
There are a few assumptions here..

Firstly, that no subsequent mistakes have been made which causes this support to fail (rare, most things here are properly tested, but "edge cases" do occur).

Secondly, each distro is free to modify the kernel releases as they see fit. Changes are sometimes made for various reasons and you cannot guarantee that the kernel configurations are the same as the "plain vanilla" versions held at www.kernel.org

Kernel purists often view distro kernel releases as "tainted". E.g. Kernel problems within Mint should be referred to the Mint Guys who will either pass the problem "up the chain" to "Ubuntu" etc. or look at it themselves.

I personally will normally use the current stable kernel and not the distro's release, unless there is a very good reason not to.. That's just me though..
Others will stick with a distro release kernel. Both methods are perfectly valid and there are reasons both for and against each method.

Bodge99

Bodge99, rather than going through acrobatics trying to recover antiX on this machine, would it not be easier to either:
1. see if MX can be detected and then be installed and let it wipe antiX?, or
2. somehow, wipe the entire eMMC drive an install e.g. Xubuntu?

go with mx linux it has lower min requirements then xbuntu and your just barely meeting the recommended requirements for xubuntu

Hi,

I'm viewing this now as using AntiX as a toolkit to wipe your eMMC.
If all goes well, then let the AntiX installer finish. This will create your EFI environment: (EFI partition, system partition, swap [if used]).

My thinking here is that it appears that the AntiX kernel handles your eMMC O.K. You should then have a bootable, working system.

Next, you could then look at other distros... A boot from an Xubuntu live flashdrive will show if the Xubuntu kernel can "see" your eMMC.

When you reach the next installation phase for your new distro, you won't need to destroy the partition structure.. just reformat the system partition as required.

One potential "gotcha": Some distro's want to see a swap partition, others can use a dedicated swap file or a swap partition. It might pay to ensure that a small swap partition is created. You can add this partition manually with gparted, but you'll need to boot from a flashdrive before you can resize the system partition to make room for the swap partition.

Bodge99

NO and Yes, No do not choose legacy route, yes create a GPT table so you will be starting fresh.

If your using gparted and you get a partition mounted error, you can highlight the partition and umount from the gparted partition menu.

another thing is for uefi mode make sure your using a 64bit iso

Hi,

I've just installed AntiX in UEFI mode in Virtualbox. Everything went well..

Only two minor niggles, one from Virtualbox and one from AntiX.

After installation and reboot, Virtualbox dumped me in the EFI shell. Easy fix.. The default boot executable searched for is boox64.efi in /EFI/BOOT .(EFI partition)
AntiX places grubx64.efi in /EFI/antix17.4.1 . At install time, /EFI/BOOT is not created, so create it and place a copy of grubx64.efi here, renamed as bootx64.efi .

The second niggle (for me) is that the EFI partition is not mounted from fstab. Again, an easy fix. Add the following to /etc/fstab
(After the entry for the system partition..)
Bodge99

These are all Debian based, primarily on Debian Stable. The *buntus while Stable based do come with updated support every six months. A Stable base can be quite old. Stretch 9.0 was released 24 months ago. While PPAs are available to those desiring newer hardware support, its availability during installation tends to be problematic in itself if not impossible. Having the same foundation commonly means the same foibles, whether desktop, kernel, drivers or support tools, such as partitioners.

Those having newer hardware related trouble would do well to at least test with something else with more mature hardware support, Debian Testing, Debian Unstable, or any of the non-Debian distros with competent GUI installers and/or live media that are released more frequently, e.g. Fedora (late April, every 6 months), or have had their latest release well after the Stable (Stretch 9.x) on which Debian derivatives are based, e.g. openSUSE Leap 15.1 (late May), Mageia (June) or PCLinuxOS (June).

When I tried to create the GPT partition table, it told me to unmount the existing partitions 1st, like I said to you in a reply yesterday. Right clicking on them only showed the "mount" option ! So, what I did was I mounted them 1st, then unmounted them. And that worked. The new GPT table was created and the old stuff wiped off.

No, that choice was not given, but since I booted the EFI version off the live USB stick, and the machine was set to UEFI mode, I assume a UEFI installation was done. For the Grub it gave a choice of installing it in MBR, PBR (only for expert users), or ESP. I chose the latter.

When the machine is (re)booted, the 1st choice is antiX, but message pops up:
The only option it gives to click is "OK", after which it looks for the installation medium.
I did not get this with the original 1st installation. So, how can this be circumvented?

Hi,

Glad to see that you are making progress.. well done!

It looks like you have secure booting enabled.. The easiest way around this is to just disable this from your firmware settings.

I've now installed Antix in UEFI mode in Virtualbox. I can confirm that the installer correctly creates the EFI, swap and system partitions when using the automatic install.

Yes, it is correct to install Grub to the ESP (EFI partition).

Bodge99.

That is funny because I have always had it set to DISABLED - this last installation seems to have reset it to ENABLED. Anyway, no worries, I was able to correct it.

Phew and phew, a relief twice ;-)

It seems to me that solves the problem and almost terminates this thread. I want to thank you for your patience, understanding, and perseverance, as well as your encouragement to push me along telling me it **will** get resolved.

I do have 2 last questions that are interrelated:

you may know that this all started because I had an annoying scrolling issue, mainly in Firefox, that I could not get rid of. My wife, who is the real user of the computer, got fed up, esp. when I could not get it resolved with all the advice from the various forums I consulted. So, for me that was the signal to ditch AntiX. And that is how I got stuck, and this thread was created. I have reinstalled AntiX because her computer almost seems wedded to it (I'm joking, of course), so here are my questions:

1. if the scrolling issue reappears can I stick a live USB with a different distro in and do an auto install (UEFI of course) that will wipe off AntiX and install the new distro? The answer is probably "yes, in theory that should be possible, but I don't know how your computer, specifically the eMMC, will react". Right? Or should I 1st wipe off the AntiX partitions with GParted on a live USB stick, then install the other distro?

2. And if I would get stuck again in the same way, can I go through the same procedure that resolved it here, i.e. create a new GPT partition table and get the existing partitions wiped?

Hi,

Very glad to see that everything is sorted now.. I hope that your "Significant Other" continues enjoying using Linux.
On a personal level I would like to thank every single person here who takes the time and effort to reply to these threads and assist in problem solving.
We were all "newbies" once and a little guided hand holding or other hints and tips can avoid people giving up and "returning to the dark side" (I **don't** mean BSD ;>) ).

You can investigate any distro at your convenience.. Most distro's have live versions.. All you need to do is boot from the live version and see if you can access your eMMC. If you can, then you should be "good to go". From this point, you can just use the auto install tools as you know that your eMMC is in a "sane" state.

You appear willing to learn.. to dive into things and try to solve your problems.. Kudos for this, I'll always encourage this when I see it.

By now, you have some appreciation of how Linux boots, the firmware settings that are required to allow a UEFI install and some of the problems that can occur along the way. A fair amount of Linux problems can be solved by understanding how the basics of Linux work. How it boots, how to modify the basic files that are concerned with booting etc.

One thing to consider for the future..

If I'm doing anything with Linux (installing, modifying.. etc) then I always try to put myself in the position "how can I get back to where I was before, e.g. I've messed up this install, the computer won't boot now... sort of thing".

In your case, with a relatively small eMMC drive (well, it is compared to a 5TB hdd) it might make sense to look at whole drive backups. This would allow you to easily restore your current installation if a subsequent new installation of something fails. (We've probably all been there at some point!)

There are many tools available to do this, but if you want me to then I'll describe how I perform this task on my tablets.
I use a single command in a terminal to create a full drive archive and a second single command in a terminal to restore. I can change any OS on my tablets in just a few minutes.. not losing any previously made changes. It saves me having to start from scratch every time.

The only hardware you need is a live Linux flashdrive (your AntiX one is fine) and an external USB device large enough to hold a compressed archive. Another flashdrive or an external USB hdd is fine.

Bodge99

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes, you are absolutely right, I am also grateful to the rest of the people who have commented here.

Actually, on my own Linux Mint computer I have an SSD and an HDD. I have my root and EFI installed on the SSD, and the /home directory on the HDD. I use Timeshift to make regular back-ups of the SSD, and those back-ups go to the /home directory, i.e. the HDD. I tried to save them to a USB stick but Timeshift does not recognise it in my case - probably my fault again.

I had not done a back-up of the tablet, thinking with the little work she uses it for it is not worth it. But that is a mistake, it IS worth it. I would appreciate it if you could give me the description of your CLI process, and what you do that makes an OS change on a tablet a process of a few minutes.

Hi, I'll write something up later on today..

Bodge99