cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20819143

> https://gitlab.com/christosangel/animatrix > > This program written in C will create some basic animation of ascii-art loaded from a txt file, while rendering the matrix effect in the terminal window. > > --- > > [!video](https://youtu.be/lYMvrrpNUUY) > > --- >

Hi everyone, I am wanting to gradually make the switch from windows to Linux on my daily use desktop. I figured the best way would be to dual boot them. I have a spare drive in my desktop that I cleaned for Linux so I can have it on a separate drive from windows. Here the process I went through which ended up being unsuccessful. Removed windows drive, installed mint on seperate SSD, install was successful, installed steam and tried some games, shut down PC, put windows drive back in PC, PC wouldn't boot to windows drive but was still booting to mint, went into BIOS and selected boot over ride to windows drive, still wouldn't boot, created windows recovery USB, tried to fix boot in recovery mode, recovery media wasn't able to fix boot, booted into mint, mounted windows drive and removed all the documents I needed to external drive, nuked windows and Linux drives and did a fresh install of windows.

Afterward, I googled how to do this properly. And the posts I found detailed basically the same process I did. I would like to try again but I don't know what I did wrong and don't want to have to go through that again.

Thanks.

PS. I have an extensive library in steam already. There's several games that I have hours into and have friends that I play with, which is why I want to keep windows for the time being while I figure out how Linux gaming works.

EDIT: thanks for all the comments. It appears my problem was when I removed my windows drive from my PC when installing mint. I will try again and keep both drives in my PC. Thanks!

EDIT 2: UPDATE: I have successfully dual booted windows 10 and linux mint. After thinking about my problem for a while, i remembered an important detail. When I first built my PC, I had windows installed on a 120gb Kingston ssd. I then later purchased an M.2 and installed windows on there. That Kingston ssd is what i wiped and put linux on, so i'm thinking maybe the bootloader stayed on the kingston drive?? i'm not exactly sure, but after watching this video, I was confident that my original plan would work this time since i did a clean wipe of both drives and did a fresh install of windows on the M.2. I am now able to boot into windows 10 and Mint from the bios with no issues. Thanks everyone for your help.

SOLVED TLDR: you can dual boot windows and linux on 2 separate drives, and it is perfectly safe (and recommended in the video i linked) to remove the windows drive from the PC, while installing linux on another drive.

I watched a video by Chris Titus in which he encouraged everyone to install auto-cpufreq immediately since it does wonders for battery life on laptops. He said it was superior to TLP and powertop auto-optimizations. Has anyone actually used this for an extended period of time? Does it really work as advertised?

Come the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is officially dropping the Xorg package, whilst it'll still be available in RHEL 9 until 2032 the countdown has begun, Xorg is on the way out. Are you and your software going to be ready in time.

New video by: @BrodieOnLinux@linuxrocks.online

Video

i actually documented something for once, so i could reference it myself later. asking for some feedback on this, but it is quite long so i get it if you don't read it all or care. figured some newbie might stumble upon this in the future and get something out of it.

• First of all, make sure you have the Void installation guide open. Most of this is just hand holding you through their instructions. For what it's worth, I think it's valuable to have another newb explain how they went about getting things done.

1. Install latest ISO

• Download the base image, which should look something like: void-live-x86_64-20210218.iso
• If you're doing this properly, ensure that the sha256sum.txt and sha256sum.sig files are authentic. The Void docs hold your hand for this step.

2. Do the Disk Mounting Thingy

• I use balena but you can use any other similar tool.

3. Boot machine and change Boot Device List ranking to USB first

• Shut computer off -> press Enter (that's the key I spam for my ThinkPad, it might be different for your machine) -> move USB HDD up to #1

4. Plug USB in and Boot up
5. Select Enter on the first option: Void Linux (no RAM)

• Or choose the RAM option if you want _superspeed. It's not really necessary and I get paranoid when doing things non-default.

7. Configure the WIFI with wpa_supplicant

• Create symbolic links and start the services bash sudo ln -s /etc/sv/dhcpcd /var/service bash sudo ln -s /etc/sv/wpa_supplicant /var/service bash sudo sv up dhcpcd bash sudo sv up wpa_supplicant bash ip link show

• Configure your network now that we know the interface (for me, that's wlp58s0) bash wpa_cli -i {wifi interface}

• Within the wpa_cli interface, set up the network bash scan scan_results add_network set_network 0 ssid "MYNETWORK" set_network 0 psk "secret" enable_network 0 0K

• Test your wifi ping google.com

• Save your configuration bash wpa_supplicant -B -i wlp58s0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

8. Enter the Void Installer

• Do the thing (going to expand on this later, I actually feel like I should study this step and understand what it is I'm doing before I tell anyone to copy me).
• For now, this video helped a ton. void-installer

8. Update the package manager bash sudo xbps-install -u xbps
9. Update the uhh rest of the stuff bash sudo xbps-install -Su
10. Restart the services: bash xcheckrestart

• On error, install the following dependency: xtools bash sudo xbps-install xtools

11. Reboot to get latest kernel version after update bash sudo shutdown -r now
12. Install packages:

• After install, I got started with: xorg, pulseaudio, i3-gaps, dmenu, alacritty, firefox, nnn, sxiv, Zathura, htop, node, rust, and ofc nvim. This will keep me going for a while. bash sudo xbps-install -Su xorg pulseaudio i3-gaps dmenu alacritty firefox nnn sxiv zathura htop nodejs rustup

13. On error, install the following dependencies: bash sudo xbps-install base-devel libX11-devel libXft-devel libXinerama-devel freetype-devel fontconfig-devel
14. Edit .xinitrc (in your home directory) to run i3-gaps on load exec i3
15. Update packages, just in case and reboot

• Honestly, I just do this out of paranoia and habit. Every time I open a terminal session I just update everything. bash sudo xbps-install -Syu bash reboot
• Some issues I faced dealt with audio, which I found was quite common. Ensure you have pulseaudio installed, and if that doesnt work, apparently alsamixer also works pretty well. Just make sure to change your i3 config (/.config/i3/config) to bind the alsamixer settings and not the default pulseaudio bindings.