Paragon Saves Idiot

[Joelgp83]

Don't worry about the usb or ram upgrades. They are looking for differences in CPU or motherboard hardware before rejecting the key. Service pack 1 also shouldn't be a problem.

 

[jefboyardee]

Service pack 1 also shouldn't be a problem.

Wouldn't think so, being that it was free.

Anyway, from the looks of it, and to you, I have a brand new security blanket... thanks for your assistance. And I'm guilty of completely wandering off the course of this thread -- I'd apologize to the OP for that, but since that's me, tough luck.

 

[jefboyardee]

To celebrate, distro mania:

 

[Joelgp83]

*whistles*

Are they empty at that point in the pic, or is that after you've installed the distros?

Reason being, that if that drive is setup using the MBR partition scheme, you won't be able to make all of them bootable partitions -- MBR has a limit of 4.

The GPT scheme, on the other hand.....go hog wild. It doesn't care, or the number is so high it won't matter.

 

[jefboyardee]

*whistles*

~bows~

Are they empty at that point in the pic

Yes, they were then. I've since installed Mint, Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Solydx... they all boot up.

MBR has a limit of 4.

Another tidbit, thanks. If we can count Windows in that list, that makes five, so have I broken another record? I recall somebody had a lot more than five; don't know how he got around that.

Anyway, the reason I needed to install all these operating systems: just to see if I could.



(The white bar has Solydx underneath.)

 

[Joelgp83]

It may be that the Linuxes (Linuxi? ) are not all bootable because the installer was smart and let multiple distros get their boot files from only one instance of grub, resulting what the computer thinks is less than four -- a sort of Grub "voodoo".

I know that the Win7 install will literally stop you from making more than 4 at install time.

If you wanna be sure, load up gparted and look at the flags set on each partition. MBR should either complain or outright not let you have the boot flag on more than 4 individual partitions.

Or, perhaps, you're using a GPT scheme to begin with? Usually win7 doesn't let you do that unles you boot up in UEFI mode -- something which I don't think you have.

 

[jefboyardee]

Being that I have four, maybe more Linux systems, I think I have to learn how the terminal works, so I'm pondering getting The Linux Command Line. Or, for free, if I want to destroy my printer, I've downloaded the 400-page LinuxCommand... opinions on either?

 

[Joelgp83]

Try option 3:

Download pdf from option 2, throw on tablet, use PDF app to page through it.

Linuxcommand is the electronic version of the physical book shown in option 1.

As for actual opinions, I dunno. Most of my linux knowledge is drawn from my early DOS days and the university of Google.

 

[jefboyardee]

Well, just to test the limit, I just installed Linux Mint Mate, for a total of five Linuxeians and Win 7. Grub had no problem, gpart looks like:

 

[jefboyardee]

throw on tablet

Disregarding that my desktop is ten years old, a tablet is the one modern device I've yet to obtain... opinions on that, for a cheapskate out of necessity?

 

[Joelgp83]

Nexus7/Nexus10, depending on your size preference, of course.

Then again, load pdf on phone > read using pdf app.

 

[jefboyardee]

Google Nexus 7" Tablet 32GB Memory (2013) $269.00

or

Nextbook 7" Tablet 8GB Memory $69.98

"cheapskate" can't take your advice, even though I'm sure it's correct.

 

[jefboyardee]

I gave up. Not only is having five distros pointless, especially when I'm still not sure of the point of one, trying to maintain them all is almost like work. So I'm back to dual boot, W7HP and Mint, with a partition for one more distro, should one take the world by storm.

Still command-line book-hunting, to extend this captivating waste of time...

 

[Rukbat]

Just so you know, and it was a proof of concept, not really a usable computer, someone way back when (Grub 0.something) installed 255 distros on a single hard drive. And they all booted (and, with the size of drives at the time, that's about all there was space for - enough of a distro to boot in each partition). If Grub now uses 2 bytes instead of 1, the number of distros Grub will let you install on 1 drive is far greater than the number you have space for.

 

[jefboyardee]

installed 255 distros on a single hard drive

Well, five is a record in _my_ house... let's seem him try that!

 

[jefboyardee]

Here's an odd question or two:

Let's say I want to try living on Mint and never starting W7, at least for a while. Is it possible, for example, to just boot off Gparted and hide the System Reserved partition, thereby making Windows invisible, bootwise? Then, of course, can I get it back just by unhiding it? Other or better ways to do this?

 

[Joelgp83]

Why not just leave it alone ? I thought you were booting off grub anyway.

 

[jefboyardee]

I knew someone would ask that and suspected it would be you ;.

The reason, for lack of a better term, is emotional. It took me over a year to pry myself off Internet Exlopder and adopt Firefox. Now I never use IE, never ever ever. Because of that forever, I now think the only way I could pry myself off Windows is to hide it from myself.

My original question is looking for a way to just kinda hide Windows from myself, but to leave a way back. I'm not sure about Linux but am certainly not taking it seriously... words spoken from having just switched back to Windows to type this.

 

[Joelgp83]

The least invasive and most reversible way to cut off access to windows would be to use that grub configurator program you've got to make Mint the default and set such a small timeout that you would have to purposefully time it right to get back into windows during bootup.

Of course, you can also reverse it by using said configurator to return grub to a more normal timeout value.

 

[jefboyardee]

First thing Linuxian I learned was a terminal install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

With that, I learned how to make Windows load first, by default. That's a clue (to both of us) about my priorities... sorry to be vacillating in public.