LinuxQuestions.org - Some personal and where to start

- Linux - Newbie (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/)

- - Some personal and where to start (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/some-personal-and-where-to-start-4175664013/)

safest way

unplug the sata to the 500gb windows drive

this way you have no danger of overwriting it during install

In the past this may have caused some confusion when the 500 was plugged back in, the reason is the "name" of the harddrive would change ( due to the order in which the PC presents them to the OS )
However, These days there is no such problem as drives/partitions are referenced with unique IDs ( UUID/PUUID ) , or at least they should be, some archaic distros may still be using /dev/sda /dev/sdb labels.. but you shouldn't need to worry about them.

I'm not sure if windows is prone to drive label changes ( like C: becomes E: if you swap sata ports )
but it shouldn't be a problem, simply plugging the 500 back in same sata port the 500 should be seen as C:

then once you boot into Linux ( after making sure the PC boots from the 120 drive first )
you just need to update grub

Code:

sudo update-grub

which should add the windows to grub menu

Ubuntu is fine, it does have an annoying feature of needlessly hiding the grub menu
( pressing shift once the "bios" screen has gone, presents it, if I remember correctly )
I think mint also does this , grrr.. makes my life difficult as I have to remember

1:/ how to show grub menu
2:/ to explain how to get to grub menu

Hazel, thank you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel (Post 6056777)

I'll try to answer some of those questions;).

Actually I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu as a learning distro. In their efforts to make it user-friendly, they have concealed a lot of the system from users. Something more mainline perhaps like Debian? Other people will have other suggestions.

If you already have Windows on the new drive, no need to put it on the old one. Your old drive should be split into several purely Linux partitions for your new systems. Most installer programs will do this for you; you tell them what drive you want to install on, the installer checks that the drive is empty, then partitions it and creates Linux filesystems on the partitions. They will be ext4, not FAT. The only people who need a FAT partition on a Linux computer are those with modern computers that have UEFI chips instead of BIOSes.

OK. sda and sdb are your drives. You need to check which of these is your empty one before you start installing! You have a live Ubuntu system on that CD, so there are plenty of ways to double check your drives. We'll get to that later. Since drives are very large these days, each drive can be (and really should be) divided into partitions. Those on the sda drive would be called sda1, sda2 and so on. Any of these could correspond to a Windows designation like C:. But earlier versions of Windows generally didn't subdivide drives, so the whole drive might be C: on your machine..

vda means nothing. I think you must have mis-typed that. ext4 is the name of a filesystem type (like FAT). It is the type of filesystem that most Linux distros use.

It's usually right at the end, the last step in the install.

Not sure if I am doing this quote thing correctly, but here goes. After some reading I went with Mint 19.2 which has support until 2023. After figuring out how to /root the system partition on my 120GB I now have a dual boot system. Mint is enough like Windows that I can intuit the basics of the desktop and if not I just Google for an answer. The technical workings are another matter. I need figure out how to add some photography software now . This will keep me amused for ages!

When it comes to adding software, Linux is quite different from Windows! In Windows, you download software packages with your browser, unzip them and click on some kind of install or setup program. That's actually a very dangerous thing to do because you have no idea what files are being installed on your machine.

In Linux, you install software through your package manager. It comes from a distro-specific repository (like an app store) and is guaranteed to be virus-free and fully compatible with your system. If it needs any special libraries, they will be installed automatically along with it. You just need to tell the package manager what you want.

Mint is unusual in having two graphical package managers. One is called synaptic and is common to all distros of the Debian family. The other, which is really just a front-end to synaptic, is the Mint Software manager and is designed especially for newbies. I suggest you start off by using that one.

^ Thank you for pointing that out.
I already did in post #9, but it can't hurt to say it twice.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel (Post 6056908)

Mint is unusual in having two graphical package managers. One is called synaptic and is common to all distros of the Debian family. The other, which is really just a front-end to synaptic, is the Mint Software manager and is designed especially for newbies. I suggest you start off by using that one.

this is not quite true
the software centre is not specific to mint
it is from gnome and is in no way related to synaptic.
it is based around PackageKit
https://packages.debian.org/buster/packagekit
https://packages.debian.org/buster/gnome-software

https://packages.debian.org/buster/synaptic

Personally I do not use GUI package managers ( just apt via CLI )
but I find Synaptic awful, the software centre is much more friendly and would recommend that over synaptic.

I stand corrected! When it comes to synaptic, I personally prefer apt or apt-get, but I find synaptic very convenient for searching. And, unlike you, I don't find it unfriendly.

What annoys me about the Mint software centre is the grading system they use. During the brief period when I used Mint, I ended up never doing grade 4 or 5 upgrades because they looked so dangerous! I knew this was ridiculous because I would have done those upgrades if I had been using synaptic -- I mean, I knew what they were -- but I just couldn't bring myself to ignore those dammned warnings. This was clearly something that was intended to be newbie-friendly but I didn't find it friendly at all. And as there was no indication of when it became safe to do the upgrade, I fancy a lot of newbies would just end up using out-of-date software. Not a good idea if there's a kernel exploit like meltdown that really needs a new kernel to be installed!

I must admit, it has been a long time since I used synaptic
maybe it has improved.

the way I search is

Code:

apt search <keyword>

( no root required )

far from perfect, it does tend to return many tenuously linked things.

if anything pops out at me based on the short description, I then

Code:

apt show <package>

( again no need for root )
that provides a much more verbose description.

more often I will research via the web
"linux <keyword(s)>"
that usually leads to "mixed results" like any web search

since there has been mention of photography
Linux photo
lead to https://www.darktable.org/
which looks interesting and is available in Debian

https://blends.debian.org/multimedia/tasks/photography