Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SalmonGod]

Annoyed with various things about Windows.  I've been thinking about it for years, but I'm actually downloading Zorin OS right now.

I know there are some very savvy Linux types around.  Any tips for getting started? 

I've never done a dual-boot set-up before.  Any stupid shit I should be warned of to avoid fucking anything up?
What are the performance effects of running Windows software through Wine or something vs running on actual Windows?  Is it feasible to drop Windows completely in favor of doing that for an artist/gamer?

[karhell]

Any tips for getting started?

Zorin looks pretty good on the user-friendliness side, but I'd still recommend getting acquainted with the basics of the command line. It's ugly at first, but should help a lot down the line.

I've never done a dual-boot set-up before.  Any stupid shit I should be warned of to avoid fucking anything up?

On the utterly-absolutely safe side, you might consider starting with a Virtual Machine before going full dual boot. That way, you don't need to mess around with partitioning and can get your hand in without the risk of fucking anything up (buggered the system? Don't like it after all? It's a VM. Just delete it).

Or you can go straight for it, which is also perfectly valid, in which case, I'd recommend the following :

• Stay calm.
• Defrag your Windows partitions beforehand. That will avoid stray clusters from getting overwritten when you create you Linux partitions (not that it's very likely to happen, but it's still a possibility).
• Be careful when creating aforementioned partitions. You want to format a blank zone of your HDD (I actually made that mistake the first time I installed ubuntu, panic-noped out on install, and ended up with no system at all >.<). Then again, I'm given to understand that the partition editor has gotten more noob-friendly since then, so you might not have trouble with that.
  

What are the performance effects of running Windows software through Wine or something vs running on actual Windows?

Pretty variable, last time I looked. You might want to have a look through the WineHQ database for compatibility details. That said, most common software should run just fine.

Is it feasible to drop Windows completely in favor of doing that for an artist/gamer?

As an artist, absolutely. As a gamer, I'm less certain. It's certainly feasible, but might be a bit of a hassle, depending on the games.

All that said, welcome to the world of GNU/Linux. Have fun and don't hesitate to ask for help

[Shadowlord]

I've heard that running Windows in a VM in linux is far more effective for gaming on linux than using Wine is, but it requires a ton of RAM, and I don't remember which VM is the best, or what hardware you'd need for it to work well, or anything else about it, really.

[Bumber]

I've heard that running Windows in a VM in linux is far more effective for gaming on linux than using Wine is, but it requires a ton of RAM, and I don't remember which VM is the best, or what hardware you'd need for it to work well, or anything else about it, really.

I personally prefer Oracle's VirtualBox.

I had to use VMware Player for an assembly programming course (because VirtualBox didn't have AVX registers enabled yet) and it gave me no end of grief. The window wouldn't resize to the proper resolution until I logged in each time. The guest additions had to be reinstalled and reconfigured on a constant basis to keep the shared host folder working. I could never get the drag and drop or copy/paste from host to guest to work. I didn't really like the interface either. There are probably some features in VirtualBox that are only in the paid version of VMware Workstation Pro, such as snapshots (saved states.)

Edit: Apparently VirtualBox doesn't get native access to the GPU, which could be important for gaming. It is, however, more lightweight (less RAM) than VMware. VirtualBox is also open source, if that's your thing.

[wierd]

I have never used that distro. Always used a Debian flavor one.

That said, the GRUB2 boot loader is very good at detecting windows installations and being able to chainload the windows partition boot sector. The issue most people have is installing linux first, then installing windows. The windows installer is not as kind, and will silently blast the MBR boot code used by grub2, killing the dual boot capabilities.

In your situation though, here is what you need to do:

In windows:

Defragment your drive. You might need to use a 3rd party tool to ensure good space consolodation at the end of the drive. Defragger is free and works reasonably well.

Use disk management to shrink your windows partition. (or use commandline based diskpart) You will need to free up at least 10gb at a minimum. I would suggest 50gb or bigger.

shut down, and boot your linux install dvd.

In linux installer:

Install linux into a new EXT4 partition, created in the space you freed up by shrinking the windows partition.
Install GRUB2 on that disk
Grub2 install will automagically detect the windows partition and make an entry in its menu.

after install, you should have a dual booting system.

[SalmonGod]

Thanks for the tips, guys.  Wierd, your post is especially helpful.

I'll probably do this sometime this weekend, and let you know how it goes.

[Arx]

I don't know about Zorin, but when I installed Mint it was pretty idiot proof. Well, as idiot-proof as partition stuff gets. Like I said, I don't know how Zorin works, but Mint has everything rigged into an automatic install option, which IIRC pretty much lets you make and format new partitions, and then after you pick/make one as the install partition all the other stuff (like installing GRUB) is automated.

[SalmonGod]

Posting from Linux.  This shit will take a lot of getting used to.  It does feel much less bloated than windows, which I like.  But I can tell that getting everything I want out of it will take a lot of research.  That was expected, though.

Big plus... there's a dark theme readily available.  Very first thing I did.  Soooo nice.

Edit:

Biggest problem I had was Windows didn't want to give me space to partition.  Turning off page file fixed it.  Took me a while to figure that out.

But I'm questioning now whether Zorin was the right choice.  I think I'm going to give Solus a shot.

[wierd]

For real, give mint a try. Cinnamon desktop is very windows-like, and it's overall a very nice distro.

[Bumber]

Lubuntu feels very Windows-like and is lightweight. The start menu is not entirely to my liking (no "All Programs"), and I haven't bothered to learn how to change it yet.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah... I decided lastnight I'd try Mint today.  I really liked the look and feel of Solus running live, but I couldn't get the installer to work and it wouldn't recognize my keyboard.

[SalmonGod]

So I installed Mint earlier today, with no issues.  Played around with it for a while. 

Main issues I'm encountering are I can't get Steam to launch.  I also haven't looked too hard yet, but I'm so far not finding any native method or applications for displaying separate wallpapers on dual monitors.  On windows, I've used Wallpaper Master for several years.  I have it monitoring two folders, one for each monitor.  Very effective.  I'm hoping there's some equivalent.

But there are definitely things I like, too.  I can see myself slowly migrating over time, as I figure things out.

[wierd]

Typically, you will want to install the windows version of the steam client, and use wine.

There is a subtle issue using windows steam client on wine-- This is not mint related, but wine related. You will need to put the "-no-dwrite" option on the launcher's command line. Then you can see the text.

It works just fine after that.

[Nullsrc]

Be glad you aren't on Arch. Steam on 64-bit Arch is nearly impossible to set up. I also remember having to fight with Windows to get the dual boot going, and that was six hours of my eight-hour install. To be fair, getting Arch configured took days and days of nonstop work, but that's because I'm a perfectionist and I had access to Arch. These things do not end well. 

As far as getting acquainted with Linux, I would advise to just read up on everything you can. If you're on Mint, then the bulk of tutorials and instructional articles are written for Debian-based platforms like Mint, so you'll have a (theoretically) easier time. Reading about everything is one of the best ways to go.

Also, StackExchange is your best friend.

[Mesa]

Be glad you aren't on Arch. Steam on 64-bit Arch is nearly impossible to set up. I also remember having to fight with Windows to get the dual boot going, and that was six hours of my eight-hour install. To be fair, getting Arch configured took days and days of nonstop work, but that's because I'm a perfectionist and I had access to Arch. These things do not end well. 

As far as getting acquainted with Linux, I would advise to just read up on everything you can. If you're on Mint, then the bulk of tutorials and instructional articles are written for Debian-based platforms like Mint, so you'll have a (theoretically) easier time. Reading about everything is one of the best ways to go.

Also, StackExchange is your best friend.

Steam on Linux is a mess in general, but with Arch being a distro without official support it's especially painful, yes. :r

OT:

On windows, I've used Wallpaper Master for several years.  I have it monitoring two folders, one for each monitor.  Very effective.  I'm hoping there's some equivalent.

I'm pretty sure that the KDE Plasma 5 desktop lets you set up separate wallpapers (and a bunch of other things) through its activities, but my experience with Plasma is fairly short and rough, however I do appreciate it for the absolute plethora of customizability options, even though I'm a Gnome guy myself which within Linux is about as un-customizable as it gets, short of using Ubuntu's Unity (which is still a fair lot given the existence of plugins and all that).

If you do not want to change desktop enviroments (which is totally fine) one way to get that to work is to stitch two wallpapers together in your image manipulation program of choice with one wallpaper on the left, one on the other and setting the 'big picture' as a wallpaper in 'span' mode. I have no experience with Cinnamon or that level of wallpaper management though but that appears to be the only solution for Cinnamon specifically, other DEs like KDE or Xfce provide less 'cheaty' methods from what I'm reading.