The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Well Played Mauer posted:

I'd like to keep my /home directory intact without having to do a bunch of work. I have /home on a btrfs subvolume in Fedora. Since OpenSUSE uses btrfs, can I just point to the old subvolume when I need to set up a new /home during install?

IMO try it and see what happens, with things backed up first of course. I feel like the worst that could happen is:
a) the suse installer might just not have the options to easily do that during install
b) suse and fedora give you a different userid and you have busted permissions

(Also of course maybe the distros have incompatible stuff in some config files, but that's a potential problem whatever method you use.)

Another option that might be a good intermediate between trying to do it at install and restoring from a backup, would be to make a btrfs snapshot of your current home to a new subvolume. Then you could let the install make a new blank home subvolume, and copy everything in the snapshot back over afterwards. It'll be much faster than restoring from a NAS or whatnot.

# ? Jan 22, 2024 22:13

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 20:30

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

Okay. Lots of stuff to respond to again as I'm preparing to poke around more at this:

Computer viking posted:

This typically means that your SATA SSD is connected to a port that's shared with the M.2 slot: The M.2 connector can supply both PCIe (for NVME drives) and SATA, and I've seen several motherboards where a couple of the SATA ports are badly documented or just marked on the board as "only works when M.2_1 is not in use" or similar. There's typically a handful of SATA ports that do not have this issue.

So, full disclosure, I didn't build my computer and was more an observer-- nor did I pick out the parts at the time. I told my friend my budget and he picked out stuff he felt was best for that. So I'm not all that knowledgeable about hardware and even when we built the computer, a lot of the things he explained at the time went over my head. That same friend was gonna come visit recently and help me out with this stuff while he was here, but other issues have delayed that until late next month or March, and I'm itching to get this ball rolling already, so! I feel like I'm not really going to learn much unless I just start bashing my head against things myself as it is.

For what it's worth, my motherboard is ASRock Fatality Z97X Killer series. Looking through the manual, it says that there are 6 SATA connectors: SATA3_0 to SATA3_5, and that 4 and 5 connectors are shared with the SATAE_1 connector for SATA Express, which is also shared with the M.2_SSD socket. Would I just need to connect my current SATA drive to one of those other connectors, and then the M.2 drive should work freely from there without a "one or the other" kind of issue?

And if that does work, would I simply be able to boot Windows from the SATA drive and Linux from the M.2 drive freely, so long as they do not intersect, by switching their boot priorities in the BIOS?

At this point I feel mostly comfortable just diving in to Linux without the need to use Windows for any particular reason, but having the option is still nice.

Computer viking posted:

"Integrated graphics" means there's a small graphics card directly inside your CPU. It's how most laptops work, and they're also fairly common on desktop CPUs that could end up in an office PC - it saves the manufacturer from having to add a whole GPU just to render some spreadsheets. If you have an HDMI (or DisplayPort) connector on your motherboard, it's for this. Your i7 4790K comes with "Intel� HD Graphics 4600".

GPU forwarding needs a bit of background.
I don't know if you've ever used a SNES emulator or anything like that? Virtual machines are the same kind of idea. You run a program that pretends to be a completely separate computer.

The biggest difference between this and a SNES emulator is that your "real" machine and the VM are basically the same. That means that instead of needing to run a lot of code to simulate e.g. a SNES, you can just fence off a bit of your CPU and run the VM directly, which is incredibly much faster; there's nearly zero overhead. The problems come when you want to use any other devices. Storage is easy enough, just inject a fake device into the VM that looks like a hard drive, and on the outside we can redirect it to whatever we want, like a file or an actual disk. Graphics is harder, because it's much more demanding. A graphics card isn't meant to be driven by two operating systems at the same time: If both Linux and Windows tried to use it simultaneously, it would instantly mess up for both of them. To keep this from happening, you're just not allowed to give a VM control of a card that's already in use.

There's three ways around this:
- You can create a fake graphics card in the VM, like we do with storage. That works, but it's not fast enough for gaming - it's comparable to windows remote desktop.
- You can buy one of the stupid expensive server cards that actually support being driven by multiple OSes (by pretending to be multiple cards) - though I don't even know if those support graphical output or if they're only for accelerating AI things
- You can put two graphics cards in your PC: One for Linux and one for the virtual machine. On the linux side, you set it up so it reserves the second GPU and doesn't touch it, and then you let the Windows virtual machine get full control over that card. This is GPU forwarding - Linux just passes one GPU on to the virtual machine.

In your case, you actually have two GPUs: The integrated intel graphics, and the nVidia 980. You probably need to find a BIOS setting for "activate the integrated GPU even if I have a separate GPU plugged in", though.

Neat! That's something I'll need to figure out once I get settled in with whatever Linux install I end up picking. GPU passthrough seems like the ideal option for any sort of Windows application I may still need after switching over (eventually, I plan on wiping Windows from the SATA drive and repurposing it, but for now, I'll keep it as it is since I feel like I'm inevitably going to break something with Linux and will want something to fall back on as I figure out how to fix it).

Klyith posted:

X11 and Wayland are doing the same thing: they're protocols rather than software, setting up how an app communicates with the OS display software. X11 is ancient and has many problems due how old and decrepit it is. Wayland is new and has many problems due to being new and unfinished.

Nvidia is fussy with Wayland because Nvidia doesn't give a poo poo about linux, particularly not consumer desktop linux. (CUDA and non-display server stuff works fine.) They waited until Wayland was actually being widely used before they got serious about support.

What the cool kids post in "check out my new desktop" on reddit isn't what most people are using. Most people use gnome or KDE. The cool kids are the people who get entertainment from setting up the new FOTM desktop environment. Not that there's anything wrong with that, or the DE that's the current new hotness. If a tiling WM works well for you, go with it.

Noted. I'll just have to test how X11 and Wayland both function running on my actual hardware as opposed to a VM (which isn't really ideal for either it seems, either that or I'm doing something wrong because the dumb thing keeps crashing lately when it didn't used to even if I'm not doing anything different). I've been hearing that NVIDIA open source drivers are getting better, so I'll just need to experiment, which leads into a question I'll be asking farther down. **

Klyith posted:

Linux definitely has a lot of three correct answers going on, and in most cases the correct choice is "go with your distro's default unless you have a strong reason otherwise". That's a lot of what a distro does -- pick from among sets (A,B,C) and (X,Y,Z) in ways that avoid problems between B and Y. This is one of the reasons arch isn't recommended for newbies, it has fewer defaults and makes you pick for yourself. And if B and Y have problems together, well that's on the wiki, you read the wiki first didn't you?

The integrated graphics is on your CPU, it's what comes out the video port (probably DVI at that vintage) on your mobo. It's good enough for desktop 2d stuff.

I was also intrigued by windows on a VM in linux with hardware passthrough. Then I discovered all my games work fine in linux. Since games were the only thing I needed that for, I never bothered getting a 2nd GPU and setting it up. A windows VM using spice video is good enough for non-game software.

Only fat32 and exfat are totally friendly between both systems. Fat isn't great.

Linux can see NTFS fine but running steam games off in linux a NTFS partition is not recommended.

Also, having a single partition that is writable by two OSes at the same time (ie the linux host and a windows VM) is very very bad. Only a matter of time until your data is corrupted bad. The two OSes will make changes that the other doesn't see, so will be working from incorrect state.

So tldr it's kinda hard to have two co-equal OSes even with the VM method. If you are frustrated with Windows or MS, I would say just go whole hog and try to move over. If you're into linux as a fun project or to learn, do a dual-boot and keep windows as the main OS.

Also noted. I will completely pass on the idea of trying to share a partition or drive with Windows. Someone past this post mentioned setting up a NAS and that does seem like the logical endpoint for a lot of what I want to do with my stuff-- not just in holding files between Windows and Linux, but also for my other devices in the house, and also holding all my ROMS for my MiSTer, which I've heard works pretty well.

That being said, ideally, I think "whole hog" is my choice here, with VM just as an "as needed, if at all" sort of thing.

So as I prepare to dive into this myself, a few other questions.

1. Coming back to what I said I was saying earlier, since I'm not sure how my computer will react to driver issues, I feel like I'm inevitably going to break something, and that's okay because breaking stuff is how I learn. I'm ready for that. That being said, what happens if something doesn't work? Do I just install a different DE/WM that will work and just uninstall the one(s) that don't? It'd just be a matter of doing pacman -Rs [insert de/wm here] to get rid of whatever leftover dependencies that would be left behind from uninstalling, right? (Or even if it does work and I just don't like it.)

2. From my tinkering with Arch, the install guide suggests formatting a partition specifically to have a boot partition. If I end up breaking something that badly, all I would really need to do in this instance is format that partition and reinstall from there, right? Everything on the other partitions (in other words, where I'd be keeping all my files) would be unaffected, right? Also for the sake of switching distros if I want to use something else, I guess. I think I'm going to start by using EndeavourOS as mentioned further upthread as a more friendly intro to Arch, but if I'm not feeling it, having the ability to switch over without losing everything would be nice.

3. When I do get around to upgrading my PC this year, it'll likely involve getting a new motherboard/CPU/GPU at the very least. When I do so, is that going to break anything I've already installed? Or will installing the correct drivers for whatever I'm using fix the issue ahead of time?

Framboise fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jan 22, 2024

# ? Jan 22, 2024 23:00

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Framboise posted:

2. From my tinkering with Arch, the install guide suggests formatting a partition specifically to have a boot partition. If I end up breaking something that badly, all I would really need to do in this instance is format that partition and reinstall from there, right? Everything on the other partitions (in other words, where I'd be keeping all my files) would be unaffected, right? Also for the sake of switching distros if I want to use something else, I guess. I think I'm going to start by using EndeavourOS as mentioned further upthread as a more friendly intro to Arch, but if I'm not feeling it, having the ability to switch over without losing everything would be nice.

I hope this isn't too overwhelming to suggest, but if you plan on using btrfs, you can actually set up a hook using snap-pac to create a snapshot (restore point) before and after pacman transactions.

There are a few ways you can set it up, and I haven't done it in a while since I have been using Pop! OS on my main computers, but there should be some decent tutorials and so on out there. Here is one person's experience: https://www.lorenzobettini.it/2023/03/snapper-and-grub-btrfs-in-arch-linux/

# ? Jan 22, 2024 23:13

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Framboise posted:

For what it's worth, my motherboard is ASRock Fatality Z97X Killer series. Looking through the manual, it says that there are 6 SATA connectors: SATA3_0 to SATA3_5, and that 4 and 5 connectors are shared with the SATAE_1 connector for SATA Express, which is also shared with the M.2_SSD socket. Would I just need to connect my current SATA drive to one of those other connectors, and then the M.2 drive should work freely from there without a "one or the other" kind of issue?

Yes, that seems like sata 0-3 should work at the same time as a nvme drive.

The Z97 is from the dawn age of nvme. Most boards could not boot from nvme until they got bios updates a while later. So if you've never updated bios, you might need to do that before you can boot the new drive.

(Also as a note your mobo only has gen2x2 lanes for the nvme drive, so it will be quite restricted in speed. Faster than sata... but not by a lot.)

Framboise posted:

And if that does work, would I simply be able to boot Windows from the SATA drive and Linux from the M.2 drive freely, so long as they do not intersect, by switching their boot priorities in the BIOS?

Your linux install should set up grub and automatically pick up the windows install on the other drive. So you won't even need to go into the bios, it will boot to a screen allowing you to pick linux or windows.

Framboise posted:

1. Coming back to what I said I was saying earlier, since I'm not sure how my computer will react to driver issues, I feel like I'm inevitably going to break something, and that's okay because breaking stuff is how I learn. I'm ready for that. That being said, what happens if something doesn't work? Do I just install a different DE/WM that will work and just uninstall the one(s) that don't? It'd just be a matter of doing pacman -Rs [insert de/wm here] to get rid of whatever leftover dependencies that would be left behind from uninstalling, right? (Or even if it does work and I just don't like it.)

Linux drivers are far more integrated than in windows. Switching between open source and proprietary nvidia is the only thing like this you might need to deal with.

Framboise posted:

3. When I do get around to upgrading my PC this year, it'll likely involve getting a new motherboard/CPU/GPU at the very least. When I do so, is that going to break anything I've already installed? Or will installing the correct drivers for whatever I'm using fix the issue ahead of time?

Move the drive to the new PC, boot it. Generally this Just Works (as long as you are using a recent kernel with support for whatever new hardware in on the new PC, which won't be a problem running arch). If there are problems you'll at least get a text console, and can rebuild the kernel image or whatever.

mawarannahr posted:

I hope this isn't too overwhelming to suggest, but if you plan on using btrfs, you can actually set up a hook using snap-pac to create a snapshot (restore point) before and after pacman transactions.

I'm pretty sure EndeavourOS does the root as btrfs and sets up snapshots by default. I know Manjaro does that.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 00:20

Well Played Mauer: Jun 1, 2003; We'll always have Cabo

Klyith posted:

IMO try it and see what happens, with things backed up first of course. I feel like the worst that could happen is:
a) the suse installer might just not have the options to easily do that during install
b) suse and fedora give you a different userid and you have busted permissions

(Also of course maybe the distros have incompatible stuff in some config files, but that's a potential problem whatever method you use.)

Another option that might be a good intermediate between trying to do it at install and restoring from a backup, would be to make a btrfs snapshot of your current home to a new subvolume. Then you could let the install make a new blank home subvolume, and copy everything in the snapshot back over afterwards. It'll be much faster than restoring from a NAS or whatnot.

Thanks for the advice here. I spent some time getting rsync up and running to back up /home to the Synology. It was pretty simple once I got my head around exclude-from because as it turns out most poo poo in my /home directory is worthless outside of config files and some documents that I'd like to not lose but wouldn't miss too terribly if I did.

This sets me up to do a fresh install and then I can pull stuff off the synology and if something breaks, I'll be able to back my way out of it with the ol' delete key.

I feel a little silly about waiting this long to do automated backups with rsync. It wasn't as intimidating as I thought it'd be and it's not like I'm particularly afraid of learning command line poo poo.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 00:38

cruft: Oct 25, 2007

Well Played Mauer posted:

automated backups

# ? Jan 23, 2024 01:11

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Nvidia sucks so much. Every now and again, ok Pop OS 22.94, X11 stops working and I can only log in with Wayland. No matter what I do, I can't get anything but a black screen, whether I'm using XFCE or Openbox. It turns out, when I put in "system76-power graphics integrated" and reboot, it works perfectly fine. I should probably switch to the "hybrid" mode but I don't use it all that often so I will just keep it like this until I need it. Score 1 Nvidia win for Wayland, though.

The system is also somehow faster. It was really bogged down today and even download speed went from like 12 MB/s to 50. Not sure how this is possible.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 02:24

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Is that a laptop with that "famed" Optimus dual graphics card system?

# ? Jan 23, 2024 04:44

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Volguus posted:

Is that a laptop with that "famed" Optimus dual graphics card system?

No, some kind of dell 17 with an nvidia rtx ?? I am relying on the switching that pop os has built in. With the hybrid mode, you can enable the GPU when launching something by setting an env var.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 04:52

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

mawarannahr posted:

No, some kind of dell 17 with an nvidia rtx ?? I am relying on the switching that pop os has built in. With the hybrid mode, you can enable the GPU when launching something by setting an env var.

I'm confused. Googling for "dell 17" only shows laptops. And the behaviour only makes sense on one, since I have a normal PC with a discrete nvidia RTX graphics card (with a CPU with integrated graphics as well) that never exhibited these kinds of issues. And for me to switch the card I'm using would mean to physically move the DPort cable from one graphics card to another.

Been using linux and nvidia for more than 20 years now, and their drivers have always been rock solid for me. But then again, I never had a laptop with that weird integrated-discrete GPU mishmash, which from all I've heard it was (still is) quite a mess.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 05:13

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Volguus posted:

I'm confused. Googling for "dell 17" only shows laptops. And the behaviour only makes sense on one, since I have a normal PC with a discrete nvidia RTX graphics card (with a CPU with integrated graphics as well) that never exhibited these kinds of issues. And for me to switch the card I'm using would mean to physically move the DPort cable from one graphics card to another.

Been using linux and nvidia for more than 20 years now, and their drivers have always been rock solid for me. But then again, I never had a laptop with that weird integrated-discrete GPU mishmash, which from all I've heard it was (still is) quite a mess.

Sorry, Dell XPS 17 - busposting over here. It's very frustrating! Thankfully I don't use the GPU for much. Should have done this earlier.

The experience with this machine has been suboptimal in general - audio issues for the first time in literally decades. Things feel better on my 6 year old T480, and the only real perceptible difference is in build times. (mind you, the t480 was a mess until many firmware updates)

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jan 23, 2024

# ? Jan 23, 2024 05:16

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

mawarannahr posted:

Sorry, Dell XPS 17 - busposting over here. It's very frustrating! Thankfully I don't use the GPU for much. Should have done this earlier.

The experience with this machine has been suboptimal in general - audio issues for the first time in literally decades. Things feel better on my 6 year old T480, and the only real perceptible difference is in build times.

Yeah, whatever magic they do in there to support the dual graphics stack ... nobody knows, since their drivers are closed. If nvidia is not willing to support it, unfortunately there's not much anyone can do.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 05:21

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

Klyith posted:

Yes, that seems like sata 0-3 should work at the same time as a nvme drive.

The Z97 is from the dawn age of nvme. Most boards could not boot from nvme until they got bios updates a while later. So if you've never updated bios, you might need to do that before you can boot the new drive.

(Also as a note your mobo only has gen2x2 lanes for the nvme drive, so it will be quite restricted in speed. Faster than sata... but not by a lot.)

Your linux install should set up grub and automatically pick up the windows install on the other drive. So you won't even need to go into the bios, it will boot to a screen allowing you to pick linux or windows.

Linux drivers are far more integrated than in windows. Switching between open source and proprietary nvidia is the only thing like this you might need to deal with.

Move the drive to the new PC, boot it. Generally this Just Works (as long as you are using a recent kernel with support for whatever new hardware in on the new PC, which won't be a problem running arch). If there are problems you'll at least get a text console, and can rebuild the kernel image or whatever.

I'm pretty sure EndeavourOS does the root as btrfs and sets up snapshots by default. I know Manjaro does that.

Looks like my board updated for more M.2 compatibility and nVME support back in 2017, and it doesn't seem like I've updated the BIOS on this like, ever. Currently formatting an SD card so I can update the bios but for some reason, converting this thing to FAT32 as it needs me to is taking an eternity. It's been nearly 2 hours and it's only at 25% complete.

Good to know that Linux Just Works with things, I was really getting concerned that I was going to mess things up by pulling the trigger now on converting before upgrading my PC.

Once I'm able to update the BIOS, I should be able to start moving forward tomorrow. I know my friend wanted to help me with this (most likely because he knows how clueless I am when it comes to hardware), but maybe he can help me plan my PC upgrade instead lol

# ? Jan 23, 2024 05:43

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Volguus posted:

Yeah, whatever magic they do in there to support the dual graphics stack ... nobody knows, since their drivers are closed. If nvidia is not willing to support it, unfortunately there's not much anyone can do.

I've only had the dGPU mode enabled, and you need a reboot for changes to apply. Unless it's on hybrid mode I think it would just be using nvidia drivers as is?

mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jan 23, 2024

# ? Jan 23, 2024 06:09

AlexDeGruven: Jun 29, 2007; Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box

I ended up with an integrated GPU by "accident" (I was whoring for cores without going threadripper and didn't realize the 7950X had it).

I'm wondering if there's a way I can use it for something. I don't have it plugged in.

Both GPU are Radeon (7900XT), so there's no driver issues.

Comedy option is mining.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 14:16

Last Chance: Dec 31, 2004

Folding@home is still active! Been folding to keep my pipes in the basement from freezing lately

# ? Jan 23, 2024 14:37

AlexDeGruven: Jun 29, 2007; Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box

Last Chance posted:

Folding@home is still active! Been folding to keep my pipes in the basement from freezing lately

drat, I totally forgot about F@H. Been quite a while.

That being said, the 7900XT is kind of a beast:

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ? Jan 23, 2024 15:43

lobsterminator: Oct 16, 2012

Last Chance posted:

Folding@home is still active! Been folding to keep my pipes in the basement from freezing lately

And before F@H was SETI@Home. Folding was a lot more sensible project but I loved the idea of finding aliens on my computer.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 15:49

AlexDeGruven: Jun 29, 2007; Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box

When I was at the Helpdesk on midnights we would run seti in all the idle computers. Was always fun to look around and see the graphs changing.

# ? Jan 23, 2024 15:51

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

I spent last evening cleaning out an old laptop (bit of sad nostalgia there) so I can do a trial run of EndeavourOS before I do it to my PC. It worked really well once I figured out how to disable Secure Boot. I even managed to get Hyprland running on it, surprisingly well considering my laptop's got NVIDIA GPU and is going on like 13-14 years old.

One problem though, despite picking "erase disk" when installing, it looks like Windows is not only still installed, but the bulk of my hard drive is still partitioned to that. How do I go about wiping all of that and merging it with the partition I've got Linux on? I tried running cfdisk but it didn't even acknowledge any of that stuff. I think I'm able to mount those partitions from my file manager but I hesitate to do so in case something gets borked.

It also seems like there's... I'm not sure if it's a separate drive or another partition, but there's also a small drive for the Lenovo recovery key. Do I still need that?

# ? Jan 24, 2024 01:18

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

gparted may be able to help you with the partition stuff. It can erase, resize, move, anything your heart desires.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 01:23

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Framboise posted:

One problem though, despite picking "erase disk" when installing, it looks like Windows is not only still installed, but the bulk of my hard drive is still partitioned to that. How do I go about wiping all of that and merging it with the partition I've got Linux on? I tried running cfdisk but it didn't even acknowledge any of that stuff. I think I'm able to mount those partitions from my file manager but I hesitate to do so in case something gets borked.

Post the output from command 'lsblk', it will give better idea what the situation is.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 02:43

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

Saukkis posted:

Post the output from command 'lsblk', it will give better idea what the situation is.

Sure.

code:

framboise@anemone ~> lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0  22.4G  0 disk
sda1   8:1    0  1000M  0 part /efi
sda2   8:2    0  13.3G  0 part /var/log
                                /var/cache
                                /home
                                /
sda3   8:3    0   8.1G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0 465.8G  0 disk
sdb1   8:17   0  1000M  0 part
sdb2   8:18   0   260M  0 part
sdb3   8:19   0  1000M  0 part
sdb4   8:20   0   128M  0 part
sdb5   8:21   0 417.6G  0 part
sdb6   8:22   0   450M  0 part
sdb7   8:23   0   350M  0 part
sdb8   8:24   0    25G  0 part
sdb9   8:25   0    20G  0 part

Pardon the formatting, Copying and pasting gave a whole bunch of &#numbers nonsense I had to clear out.

I'm not really sure what happened. I don't know where all those little partitions came from or why they're labeled sdb instead of sda.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 06:24

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

sdb is just another disk. It looks to be a 465G disk. Poor sda is just 22.4G .

So you have 2 disks, sda and sdb. sdb seems to be completely untouched, everything got installed on sda. Is that an USB drive by any chance? Looks small for a disk drive, even if SSD, but I could be wrong.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 06:49

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

I don't think there are 2 disks in this laptop though? As far as I'm aware, this thing's got a 512GB disk in it. No USB drives or SD cards in use.

The 417GB partition you see is my C: drive on Windows, and the 25GB one there is the Lenovo recovery key thing on D:. I genuinely have no idea what the others are or why they're there.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 07:08

Mr. Crow: May 22, 2008; Snap City mayor for life

I've seen stories of weird rear end firmware having hidden partitions etc, but probably its just two disks. Maybe there is some sort of small recovery drive they dont tell you about or something that was hidden from windows but linux sees it just fine?

You can use

code:


lshw -class disk

to show the disk information, manufacturer etc.

edit: oh ya, C: and D: are just two disks then, you installed over D: (maybe you didnt want to? oops!)

# ? Jan 24, 2024 09:19

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

The other possibility would be a small EMMC solid-state storage device, because the laptop model was also sold without a drive at all.

If that's the case it's a cute place to put a linux install, particularly if you're still dual-booting and keeping the windows install primary. But you probably don't want swap on it. (That's virtual memory, same as a page file on windows -- linux uses a dedicated partition for that instead.)

Framboise posted:

The 417GB partition you see is my C: drive on Windows, and the 25GB one there is the Lenovo recovery key thing on D:. I genuinely have no idea what the others are or why they're there.

The linux device names for most disk drives are like this: "sda3" means drive 1, partition 3. So you apparently have two physical drives, sda and sdb.

sdb is your normal drive, and that mess of partitions looks to me like you've had some windows upgrades or a format/reinstall in the past that wasn't 100% clean.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 14:10

repiv: Aug 13, 2009

22.4GB is an odd size for an eMMC though, you'd think it would be 16GB or 32GB

:iiam:

# ? Jan 24, 2024 14:11

Watermelon Daiquiri: Jul 10, 2010; I TRIED TO BAIT THE TXPOL THREAD WITH THE WORLD'S WORST POSSIBLE TAKE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID AVATAR.

i dont think lsblk shows unpartitioned space, but why the installer wouldnt partition the entire volume is :iiam:

# ? Jan 24, 2024 14:59

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

There is that youtube series on crazy things hidden in Laptop firmware/recovery partitions/secret second emmc disks/ram partitions that get filled from an image file. It is fun to watch. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLec1d3OBbZ8IBeFODHXLy0m0okuZhqJnT

I agree that the partitions on sdb are some Lenovo craziness. And so is the secret sda drive.

It could be some hard/firmware level "raid" style partitioning. Where the sda is split off from the normal hard-drive on a driver level, with the OS having no way to see the actual drive layout. In that case you installed into some sort of recovery partition.

VictualSquid fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Jan 24, 2024

# ? Jan 24, 2024 16:07

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

VictualSquid posted:

I agree that the partitions on sdb are some Lenovo craziness.

The 25gb and 20gb partitions on the end, yeah. One is probably an OEM recovery partition, the other is ????

But the sequence of sdb1-7 I'm pretty sure is a nest of two or more windows reinstalls:

code:

sdb1   8:17   0  1000M  0 part  <- old efi boot
sdb2   8:18   0   260M  0 part  <- old windows 7 recovery
sdb3   8:19   0  1000M  0 part  <- current efi boot
sdb4   8:20   0   128M  0 part  <- MSR partition
sdb5   8:21   0 417.6G  0 part  <- actual windows OS
sdb6   8:22   0   450M  0 part  <- current windows 10 recovery
sdb7   8:23   0   350M  0 part  <- old windows 10 recovery

That's what you get if you do a format and reinstall but don't know about diskpart clean. So you just delete the existing C: windows partition and install windows into that space complete with new boot and recovery partitions, leaving the useless old ones around the outside like parenthesis.

But yeah there's definitely other weird stuff going on -- the mystery 25GB partition being similar in size to the 22.5GB sda makes me wonder if sda is really just a partition that the firmware is playing games with.

# ? Jan 24, 2024 16:33

Generic Monk: Oct 31, 2011

I installed Fedora 39 on my PC since I wanted to see how good Steam/Proton has got in a non-steamdeck environment. Unfortunately I have an Nvidia card (3070) and underestimated how wank the drivers still are. I was struggling with black screens for a while when logging in which I managed to 'fix' with adding 'nomodeset' in GRUB. This works but has the side effect of seemingly causing these video mode switches when I lock the screen and such. Any way to fix the drivers so that I don't have to have this option enabled?

I also think there's some weirdness with sleep but need to double check that. Other than that it works surprisingly well, like 70% of the games I tried work! Fewer than on the steam deck and with way more loving about but still heartening.

# ? Jan 26, 2024 18:18

Mr. Crow: May 22, 2008; Snap City mayor for life

I don't think there is a one-size fits all solution for nvidia and linux, its all dependent on hardware. In general you'll have some issues like that but it should be more or less usable once you figure out the magic flags that work for you?

Out of curiosity are you using rpmfusion for the drivers? I think it automatically sets the most likely necessary flags but its been 2+ years since i had an nvidia card.

Re: games, I would expect it to be more than 70% with minimal fiddling, at least for single player games. Are you using proton-ge? Thats usually better than proton, as it includes various windows libraries and other things by default that vanilla cant due to licensing or something.

# ? Jan 26, 2024 21:50

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

Generic Monk posted:

I installed Fedora 39 on my PC since I wanted to see how good Steam/Proton has got in a non-steamdeck environment. Unfortunately I have an Nvidia card (3070) and underestimated how wank the drivers still are. I was struggling with black screens for a while when logging in which I managed to 'fix' with adding 'nomodeset' in GRUB. This works but has the side effect of seemingly causing these video mode switches when I lock the screen and such. Any way to fix the drivers so that I don't have to have this option enabled?

I also think there's some weirdness with sleep but need to double check that. Other than that it works surprisingly well, like 70% of the games I tried work! Fewer than on the steam deck and with way more loving about but still heartening.

Like the above poster said, you should install them from rpmfusion. However, here's my kernel command line in /etc/default/grub

pre:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet nvidia-drm.modeset=1 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.fbdev=1"

They work without a problem (Xorg though, not Wayland).

# ? Jan 26, 2024 23:59

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

Framboise posted:

Looks like my board updated for more M.2 compatibility and nVME support back in 2017, and it doesn't seem like I've updated the BIOS on this like, ever. Currently formatting an SD card so I can update the bios but for some reason, converting this thing to FAT32 as it needs me to is taking an eternity. It's been nearly 2 hours and it's only at 25% complete.

I know this is starting to stray a bit from Linux questions, but no matter what I try, I can't get the BIOS updated on my motherboard so I can install the M.2 drive. No matter how I format it, it says there's no image to flash from. I've tried Internet Flashing but it doesn't seem to want to connect despite my computer having no issue connecting to the internet-- it's a wired connection.

I've reformatted it a whole bunch of different ways, put the bios file in a small partition of the 8GB SD rather than the whole thing, tried FAT and FAT32, and I just keep hitting dead ends. :|

Klyith posted:

The 25gb and 20gb partitions on the end, yeah. One is probably an OEM recovery partition, the other is ????

But the sequence of sdb1-7 I'm pretty sure is a nest of two or more windows reinstalls:
code:
sdb1   8:17   0  1000M  0 part  <- old efi boot
sdb2   8:18   0   260M  0 part  <- old windows 7 recovery
sdb3   8:19   0  1000M  0 part  <- current efi boot
sdb4   8:20   0   128M  0 part  <- MSR partition
sdb5   8:21   0 417.6G  0 part  <- actual windows OS
sdb6   8:22   0   450M  0 part  <- current windows 10 recovery
sdb7   8:23   0   350M  0 part  <- old windows 10 recovery
That's what you get if you do a format and reinstall but don't know about diskpart clean. So you just delete the existing C: windows partition and install windows into that space complete with new boot and recovery partitions, leaving the useless old ones around the outside like parenthesis.

But yeah there's definitely other weird stuff going on -- the mystery 25GB partition being similar in size to the 22.5GB sda makes me wonder if sda is really just a partition that the firmware is playing games with.

So maybe the attached file can shed some light! I'm on the still-existing Windows 10 install on this laptop right now and I found this in Disk Management:

I'm not really sure where EndeavourOS is installed right now, but I'm gonna assume it's on Disk 0 somewhere (seems to match up with sda?), and the Lenovo recovery thing is the D: partition. But, if that's the case, why does the second drive even exist at all?

Either way, something's broken with my EOS install. Tried running a system update and something must have gone wrong, because the update kept looping until I killed the process. Then when I rebooted, no matter which kernel I try to use, it doesn't get past the file system check and just hangs. I've tried to install fresh but for some reason the installer says it's "waiting on 1 module" forever.

Computers are fun! :unsmith:

(help pls)

Framboise fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jan 29, 2024

# ? Jan 28, 2024 23:57

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Framboise posted:

I know this is starting to stray a bit from Linux questions, but no matter what I try, I can't get the BIOS updated on my motherboard so I can install the M.2 drive. No matter how I format it, it says there's no image to flash from. I've tried Internet Flashing but it doesn't seem to want to connect despite my computer having no issue connecting to the internet-- it's a wired connection.

I've reformatted it a whole bunch of different ways, put the bios file in a small partition of the 8GB SD rather than the whole thing, tried FAT and FAT32, and I just keep hitting dead ends. :|

So are you not seeing the SD card drive in the BIOS at all, or just not able to see the specific image file?

#1) I would use a plain USB flash stick if at all possible. The BIOS probably needs basic USB mass storage device and it could be that whatever card reader you are using isn't doing that. And yeah formatting a smaller partition with FAT or FAT32 is the most compatible way to go. (More recent boards can do exFAT, or even NTFS sometimes.)

#2) Check again that you have your exact model of your mobo right. Like, X or not-X?
https://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/fatal1ty z97x killer/
https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20Z97%20Killer3.1/

The BIOS will have checks to make sure you don't load the wrong firmware, so if you got the wrong one it just wouldn't show up.

(Also you've extracted the file from the zip right?)

Framboise posted:

So maybe the attached file can shed some light! I'm on the still-existing Windows 10 install on this laptop right now and I found this in Disk Management:

Huh, well, that is... a really nice mix of Windows and OEM perversity there. I would guess that only the 450MB recovery partition is actually in use, and the others are leftover from Windows 7 or whatever the laptop originally came with.

You could probably remove both the 25GB D: and the 20GB recovery and use that space to install linux.

Framboise posted:

I'm not really sure where EndeavourOS is installed right now, but I'm gonna assume it's on Disk 0 somewhere (seems to match up with sda?), and the Lenovo recovery thing is the D: partition. But, if that's the case, why does the second drive even exist at all?

Yeah, those 3 partitions on Disk 0 are your boot, / , and swap partitions.

What model of laptop is this exactly?

Framboise posted:

Either way, something's broken with my EOS install. Tried running a system update and something must have gone wrong, because the update kept looping until I killed the process. Then when I rebooted, no matter which kernel I try to use, it doesn't get past the file system check and just hangs. I've tried to install fresh but for some reason the installer says it's "waiting on 1 module" forever.

Without knowing what the heck that Disk 0 / sda actually is, it's very hard to say. It might be a problem because that drive isn't a real thing, just a section of the other drive that's faked for whack OEM reasons. Or it might be that a 13 GB partition is too small and it ran out of space while processing the update. (A somewhat stupid thing about Arch is that pacman's kernel update process is to remove the old one before installing the new one. Which can leave you hosed in situations where it doesn't complete.)

# ? Jan 29, 2024 16:03

Saukkis: May 16, 2003; Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

Framboise posted:

Either way, something's broken with my EOS install. Tried running a system update and something must have gone wrong, because the update kept looping until I killed the process. Then when I rebooted, no matter which kernel I try to use, it doesn't get past the file system check and just hangs. I've tried to install fresh but for some reason the installer says it's "waiting on 1 module" forever.

Computers are fun!
(help pls)

You could try a bunch of other commands to gather more information.

code:

sudo lshw -class disk
sudo blkid
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb

# ? Jan 29, 2024 18:12

Framboise: Sep 21, 2014; To make yourself feel better, you make it so you'll never give in to your forevers and live for always.; Lipstick Apathy

Klyith posted:

So are you not seeing the SD card drive in the BIOS at all, or just not able to see the specific image file?

#1) I would use a plain USB flash stick if at all possible. The BIOS probably needs basic USB mass storage device and it could be that whatever card reader you are using isn't doing that. And yeah formatting a smaller partition with FAT or FAT32 is the most compatible way to go. (More recent boards can do exFAT, or even NTFS sometimes.)

#2) Check again that you have your exact model of your mobo right. Like, X or not-X?
https://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/fatal1ty z97x killer/
https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20Z97%20Killer3.1/

The BIOS will have checks to make sure you don't load the wrong firmware, so if you got the wrong one it just wouldn't show up.

(Also you've extracted the file from the zip right?)

Oh.

I am dumb.

Yeah I was using the wrong BIOS update. I have a Z97X, not Z97. I put that on my USB stick with a small partition and it worked with no issues. I'll see if I can't get the M.2 drive installed today and have the SATA drive I'm currently using just shipped over to a different connector, so I should be able to use both.

Thanks for that, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to get that figured out yesterday. (Like, all afternoon.)

Klyith posted:

Huh, well, that is... a really nice mix of Windows and OEM perversity there. I would guess that only the 450MB recovery partition is actually in use, and the others are leftover from Windows 7 or whatever the laptop originally came with.

You could probably remove both the 25GB D: and the 20GB recovery and use that space to install linux.

Yeah, those 3 partitions on Disk 0 are your boot, / , and swap partitions.

What model of laptop is this exactly?

Without knowing what the heck that Disk 0 / sda actually is, it's very hard to say. It might be a problem because that drive isn't a real thing, just a section of the other drive that's faked for whack OEM reasons. Or it might be that a 13 GB partition is too small and it ran out of space while processing the update. (A somewhat stupid thing about Arch is that pacman's kernel update process is to remove the old one before installing the new one. Which can leave you hosed in situations where it doesn't complete.)

Answers somewhat out of order:

I'm using a Lenovo U410 Ideapad (closest link I could find to my particular model as the one I kept finding when I was searching was one with different specs).

The pacman issue sounds likely. I already had some stuff installed (plus an extra WM I was playing around with when I wasn't using GNOME) so if that's the case it's not surprising it freaked out on me.

Honestly I haven't got an issue with wiping the entire laptop clean and having it be my guinea pig. I haven't touched this laptop more than a couple times since 2016 when I got my desktop (and I've got a Surface Pro 4 that I use as my occasional travel computer since it's small and lightweight), so it's nice for it to have a purpose again. I suppose it might be nice to retain the recovery partition if I need it, but if I don't, I'm fine with it being a dedicated Linux device. It's more a matter of figuring out how to do that.

I assume the answer is to just take the nuclear option and format both drives completely then do a clean reinstall?

Saukkis posted:

You could try a bunch of other commands to gather more information.
code:
sudo lshw -class disk
sudo blkid
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb

Would if I could, but I can't even get to the terminal to do anything.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 19:59

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Framboise posted:

Thanks for that, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to get that figured out yesterday. (Like, all afternoon.)

Once you get in that type of rabbit hole it's always easier for someone else to see those answers.

Framboise posted:

I'm using a Lenovo U410 Ideapad (closest link I could find to my particular model as the one I kept finding when I was searching was one with different specs).

Yup! It has a 32GB onboard EMMC drive with some type of batshit automatic cache:

old review posted:

Lenovo provides a dual drive setup where a 32 GB SSD (used for caching) accompanies a 500 GB HDD from Seagate. You get a slight boost in performance with Intel�s caching technology with large storage for your data.

The capacity is actually specified as 32 GB. However, the user can only access 25.47 GB, so installations of frequently used programs (shown as drive D in the file manager, and the boost partition is not listed). According to HDTune, the remaining memory is in a RAID 0 array with a part of the 500 GB hard disk and serves as a boost storage device.

Remaining mysteries... How the gently caress does that RAID0 work? Is it a firmware thing, or were there some special drivers to manage that within the OS? Do those drivers still exist? Exactly how much cocaine were lenovo's engineers doing when they came up with this?

Framboise posted:

Honestly I haven't got an issue with wiping the entire laptop clean and having it be my guinea pig. I haven't touched this laptop more than a couple times since 2016 when I got my desktop (and I've got a Surface Pro 4 that I use as my occasional travel computer since it's small and lightweight), so it's nice for it to have a purpose again. I suppose it might be nice to retain the recovery partition if I need it, but if I don't, I'm fine with it being a dedicated Linux device. It's more a matter of figuring out how to do that.

I assume the answer is to just take the nuclear option and format both drives completely then do a clean reinstall?

Yeah if you don't care about the old Windows on it, that's what I'd do. Book the live linux USB installer and just blam a new partition table on both drives with gparted / KDE partitionmanager.

I'm not sure how best to use that EMMC drive. Linux is much less amenable to doing things like "install some of your programs on drive D to make them faster". Like, you could do that with links, but it's a PITA.

Using part of that sda for /boot isn't a bad idea, it'll make the laptop boot faster at least.

# ? Jan 29, 2024 23:26

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 20:30

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

eMMC as a cache to speed things up in RAID0

Klyith posted:

Exactly how much cocaine were lenovo's engineers doing when they came up with this

# ? Jan 29, 2024 23:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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