The Minty Flavor Of Linux

If you read my post about horse photography it will become clear that I have difficulty defining a strategy for learning and sticking to it. As an outgrowth of that I am composing this post using Atom in a clean install of Linux Mint from my laptop that came with Windows 10 after failing to get my laptop to dual boot Linux so I could learn to code Python using Linux after I abandoned learning to code Java using Windows. Wow.

Installation

I was understandably nervous about screwing things up as concerns the partitions on my hard drive in the event I should want to restore Windows at a later date...as I had been forced to do after my failed experiment with dual booting. I was curious if the default installer would replace the EFI partition that Windows had created so I opted to let it do its thing and then reboot from the USB thumb drive again and see what it had done. It did indeed create a new EFI partition of its own, but it did not create a separate partition for /home which is what I wanted to do based on what all the Interweb Linux experts had said.

I then used The Googles to read up on Linux installations and find the instructions of someone that had created their own partition table in order to mimic their file system choices etc. I started the installation again, but created the partition table myself. I also chose not to allocate as much space for the EFI partition. The default installer had allocated a little over 500mb, but was using only 33mb. Given that the Windows EFI partition had only been 256mb I dropped it to that. After finishing the installation the computer booted and all was well with the world.

Positives

I like the Mint UI (currently Cinnamon is the default theme). It can be customized quite a bit using the settings. It can no doubt be customized a great deal further if you know what you are doing. Mint is definitely more streamlined and sleek than the standard Ubuntu distro (which I have played with in a VM in the past). In addition, I do like the strides that have been made in making installation of apps more user friendly. A few things I thought would be problematic were actually quite easy. I was able to run 1Password 4 for Windows using Wine, and I was able to setup the Linux version of Dropbox with zero issues. Most importantly though, it was a good learning experience, and reminded me of some things I knew years ago but had moved to my brain's long term storage...which is not being very well tended I must say! I am going to have to talk to someone in that department.

Problems

Of course I ran into the inevitable problems of using Linux as a non expert. There are various strange behaviors i.e. the Bluetooth service randomly turning itself back on after reboot despite my setting it to be off. This was a problem I decided not to investigate. A fairly big issue is that Backblaze does not support Linux (except via a cloud service which is not the same animal). If I end up running Linux as my primary OS I will need to find another solution for offsite backups.

I ran into an issue getting an 8.5gig double layer DVD+R disk to mount. The disk did get mounted eventually using the command line, but would still not copy my file to the hard drive. Each time it would fail at the 4gig mark with an error about splicing. On a 64 bit computer I am unsure why that would be an issue. Rather than continuing to fight with it I tried to try and grab the file from the USB drive it was originally on which had been formatted using MacOS. Had I known Linux would read my MacOS USB drive so easily I would not have bothered burning the disk in the first place! Incidentally, a single layer 4.7gig DVD+R mounted automatically with no problems.

That large file in question was a Windows 10 .iso which I had planned to use with VirtualBox. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts I was never able to get this to work. There were installers for VirtualBox listed in the application installer, and despite getting it installed, it simply would not boot from the .iso no matter how much I messed with the settings. As a matter of fact, I was able to freeze Linux to the point of having to hard reset my laptop <hyperbole>despite the assurance of Linux fans the world over that this is impossible </hyperbole>. After failed attempts at installing VirtualBox from the source code I abandoned the project as a failure.

Why Continue Down The Rabbit hyperbole?

There are three primary reasons I am tempted to continue with this experiment: I am not fond of Windows, my Mac Mini is so slow it makes me want to open a vein, and I cannot afford a decent Mac laptop (read top of the line). In addition (reason four?) I would like to learn programming, and I think I would like to do it the hard way. It seems to me that the process of learning to use Linux would ultimately be beneficial in a deeper understanding of programming. Perhaps that is a mistaken assumption.

What Next?

Given my nature, it is hard to say what will happen next. I may end up restoring Windows and playing with Linux in VirtualBox (which has its own limitations), or perhaps I will buy that Raspberry Pi that has been tempting me...more horse photography. I suspect I will start by installing another distro and playing with that...probably today.

In the end, I hope to have an overall gain in understanding of computer hardware, operating systems, file systems, and then to eventually learn programming. But, as those with horse photography problems know, I will probably end up writing another post soon about how I have restored my laptop to Windows 10 and and am trying to figure out the best way to become a miniature portrait painter.