@John: Thanks for Your words of encouragement. And thanks for pointing the system menu out to Me. I wasn't paying attention
Hi Michaela, I'm glad with your initiative to write down your steps. And I'm also glad you picked Linux Mint as your starting point, because I also chose this distro one week ago when I decided to try Linux as an alternative for an online OS. So far, I always used windows. I now multiboot windows 8.1 & Linux Mint. It's my ambition to have windows 8.1 only as offline OS. (I'm still using it online) Instead of Cinnemanon, I picked the KDE variant because on certain forums, I've read that this desktop environment is more customizable. I guess there won't be such a big difference between all those variants. I don't know if it's appreciated or not that I post it here, but here are some points I have spent my time with last days in customizing my Linux Mint: - (bios)time: I've noticed that Linux changes the BIOS time (conforming UTC-timezone). After my session in Linux Mint, when I booted back to Windows I noticed that the Windows clock was changed (minus 2 hours, I live in UTC+2) Changing the BIOS time didn’t resolve this problem because next time I booted back to Linux Mint, it changed again. Solution is that you have to tell Linux to change it’s behavior: (http)forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=138384 - Mounting network shares: as a lot of people, I also use a NAS (Synology). So far, it was only used for access from a windows PC/Android smartphone. After a lot of time, I’ve learned it is very easy to mount a network share. Linux Mint can handle smb file service just like Windows. The good news is that I had nothing to change with the settings of my NAS. Only in Linux, there are some settings to do. Here it is well explained: (https)wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently - Password: I hated it that every time you open the Software Manager, you have to type your password (I have a long password). Here’s a trick to disable the password prompt, although lot of people warn that you lose a lot of security when doing this. (https)youtube.com/watch?v=40sQQ-6By2w - Numlock: on booting, the numlock is always disabled by default. I hated that, so here’s another trick to enable numlock automatically at every boot: (http)forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=116017 My next steps are experimenting with WINE, because I would like to use some software written for Windows in my Linux environment. So far, didn't have luck. Sorry for the links not working in this post, I'm not allowed to post links yet.
I just change the time in Windows and this usually sets everything straight. But I'm not using mint. It's worth a shot though. Setting up anything that has root access without a password is not safe at all, and if you are running a distro with systemd this could be devistating because you will be opening the system up for malware/spyware/virus'. This is not proven, only some educated speculation because systemd is the Linux equivalent of svchost. Still having a open system like that WILL leave you open to hackers, along with other malicious code.
Had the same time offset issue of w7 and mint. The fix mentioned above did the trick. sudo vi /etc/default/rcS Then edit UTC=no and save it. But that vi is very strange to use.
You can actually break your system if you don't use vi to edit certain system configs. But unless it is specifically needed then any editor like nano or a basic text editor will work.
Hello Yen - I find it's a lot easier to use gedit, the graphic file editor. (Example: sudo gedit /etc/default/rcS) Just be sure to do two things when closing gedit. Go up and click "File", and select "Save" to save your changes. Then click "File" a second time and select "Quit" to exit gedit.
You convinced me, I changed it back to use the password again. How do you think about WINE and security? Is it possible that a windows program under WINE can compromise a Linux system? Meantime, I changed from Linux Mint KDE to Cinnamon. I was pleasantly surprised: in my opinion, the latter has a way more intuitive interface. Don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I feel that Cinnamon is cleaner then KDE. It looks more professional. At the moment, I will stick with Cinnamon.
As of now, I will myself try to install Mint (same version as you @M.J) because I have used it before and will try it again. Will be interesting to see if it will work with W10. Note, you do know that you can edit GRUB, right? If not, I guess John or I could tell you how, then you can reduce/increase countdown until boot of highlighted OS, choose what to be custom and so on. EDIT Seems like Linux cannot detect the W10 installation Maybe manual install will fix the problem...
@bjorn96: Please keep us apprised as to what You had to do to make Mint run alongside Windows 10. For this particular machine, I have two things to figure out. 1 ) How to make grub understand the mouse (and, hopefully the touch screen) at bootup time. and 2 ) Setting up a nice virtual keyboard for the touch interface. Once I do this, I will no longer need to have a second mouse / keyboard on my workstation.
You're right. I hoped there is a better editor around vi is too much 'legacy' lol. You can instead make the changes to windows using UTC, to do so you have to edit the registry. Run regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation Create a new DWORD (32bit) and name it RealTimeIsUniversal, set its value to 1 and reboot. BTW: I went shopping. Spent mint a own SSD an EVO 850 and installed mint on it. Perfect!
Hello Michaela - OK, you originally claimed your touch screen worked perfectly, but now it seems there is a small glitch: It works after you get to the desktop but you cannot use it to log in during system boot(?). Here are a couple of things for you to check. 1.) Verify your touch screen is a USB device - Do this by opening the Terminal and entering " lsusb "; this will list all USB devices present on the system. Examine the output carefully and verify that your touch screen appears there; I'm hoping this is the case. If it does, proceed to the next step. If it does not, it means the touch screen is connected as a serial device. If this is the case, do not proceed any further and post back to this thread. Troubleshooting serial devices is much more involved and I'm not getting into it if I don't have to. 2.) Now check to see if the kernel modules usbtouchscreen and usbhid are loaded at system boot. Open the Terminal and enter " sudo gedit /etc/modules ". Do you see this? # /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time. # # This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded # at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored. loop lp usbtouchscreen usbhid rtc If you find that all 5 of the lines listed above are not present, then add the missing lines to this file. Then go up and click "File" and select "Save", then click "File" once more and select "Quit". After doing this, reboot the machine. 3.) Now go to Menu > Preferences > Accessibility, then click the Typing tab and verify that the setting "On Screen Keyboard" is set to "On".
Hi John, From within Linux, the touch screen works fine. It does not work during the boot loader. Neither does the mouse. Only the keyboard does. When I execute "lsusb" I do see the usb touch screen driver. I added the 5 lines to my /etc/modules, and it looks exactly like Your example. I rebooted and still no joy. The keyboard works, but it's ugly. I'm installing some tools (GNU C++ and Code:blocks) to build a keyboard Module that I found on the web.
Hello Yen - There is one thing I must point out if you're not already aware of it - the Samsung 850 EVO uses TLC nand and has an unusual erase block size of 1536Kb(1.5Mb or 3072 sectors). This means that if you align the first disk partition at the 1Mb boundary(1024Kb or 2048 sectors) as you would with any SSD using MLC nand, the filesystem will be out of alignment with the SSD's physical erase blocks. This results in an unnecessary amount of wear and tear when deleting any files since two erase blocks will be subjected to an erase/rewrite cycle as opposed to just one if the filesystem is properly aligned. Since partitioning tools like Gparted work only with whole Mb and not with fractions, you should align the first disk partition at a multiple of 1536Kb, such as 3Mb(3072Kb or 6144 sectors) or 6Mb(6144Kb or 12288 sectors).
I'm sorry, it looks like I misunderstood your other post. It's not that the onscreen keyboard doesn't work, it's just that you don't like it's appearance. Let me dig around and see what I can come up with for a replacement.