abarbarian Posted January 25, 2011 Author Share Posted January 25, 2011 Does time spent meditating waiting for Windows to reboot after every system change count towards the ten years?If so, I have reached enlightenment several times over.Buddah in waiting Yes I did get the PM. I really don't do a lot of videos, unless they are about tech. I thought you might be a fan. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 11, 2018 Author Share Posted March 11, 2018 Yeah, E17 is a bit too buggy for my tastes. Well let us know which DE you decide to use. Taken me some time to reply but I decided to use WINDOWMAKER. Was looking for some information that I thought might be in an old post and came across this thread which looks like it is all about my first try at an Arch install. Seems I have not progressed much in the last seven years. I may have more knowledge about linux in general and can even use a few command line instructions from memory. However I still have a crippled Arch install with a buggy window manager. The story continues. I have been using Arch as my main os since this thread started, I do gaming on a Windows 7 which I have as a dual boot. However if a game works on linux I play it from my Arch install. At present my Arch is slightly borked due to me fiddling around with my bootloader "refind" . Despite managing to chroot into Arch via a Arch usb/.iso and reinstalling refind I could not boot up. Almost giving up and deciding to do a fresh install I remembered that you could set up refind to run from a usb. This I did and whoopeee I booted into my beloved Arch. All I needed to do now was a quick update a reinstall of refind and away I would sail into the vastness of the world wide web. Bear in mind that my Arch had been down for around three months. I was rather taken aback by the amount of updates needed. What is a few MB's between friends I thought and carried on with the update. Which went rather well. Everything seemed to work just fine. Refind installed seemingly ok. Time for a reboot. Surprise surprise I could not boot from my Arch install. Back to the refind/usb method, which worked, phewww that was a relief. I do not use a log in manager thingy, just log in from the cli and startx. Hey up what the heck startx not working. Some message about a missing ".so" file, maybee that mega update had a small glitch. Lets try a "Syu", nope not fixed. Lets try reinstalling windowmaker, what pacman can not find windowmaker, hmmmmm. Oh wait on windowmaker has been kicked out and is now in the AUR . Hmm reinstalling did not seem to solve the problem. Looking at the AUR page it seems there is a problem with the package. Darn I can not research and fix that from a command prompt with no GUI. What to do ? So I installed ICEWM, maybe I should have gone with flubox. Anyways here I am back in Arch, booting from a refind/usb and using icewm instead of windowmaker. Looks like I have made tons of progress since my first post Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 So why did you decide to go with rEFInd? Why not go with Grub or systemd-boot? I have found both to be a lot easier to set up and use than rEFInd. Personally I use systemd-boot on most of my machines, except for my main one which has grub. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 11, 2018 Author Share Posted March 11, 2018 (edited) So why did you decide to go with rEFInd? Why not go with Grub or systemd-boot? I have found both to be a lot easier to set up and use than rEFInd. Personally I use systemd-boot on most of my machines, except for my main one which has grub. Grub is so so yesterday and I wanted to move with the times. I did not want to use systemd as there is tons of systemd stuff in use already, don't keep all your eggs in one basket sort of thing. I tried some Live CD os, can not remember which one that used rEFind, to do some rescue work and it found my Arch and Windows and displayed them really neatly aswell as the Live CD offerings. That impressed me as it was slick and cool and worked well. Really rEFind was not hard to set up, once I had read and understood the documentation. No more difficult than any other program. I only had to make a small tweak to a config file to get a working solution. Unfortunately I seem to have had some set up problems with rEFind, some of which I have solved and in the main it was working ok. However my attempts to make it work even better have resulted in more glitches. Still I have found that you can have a rEFind rescue usb and it worked for me so I am making some progress. I am a bit puzzled as to why uninstalling and reinstalling rEFind did not work. Guess I'll just have to keep on playing and learning. In the interim I now have WindowMaker back in action. I had to use an earlier version that I had in pacmans cache. This is not ideal but at least I have a desktop I am familiar with to work with. As I temporary measure I guess I can use the do not update this program in the pacman config to keep it running till I find the solution to what is stopping the latest AUR offering from working. Edited March 11, 2018 by abarbarian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Well, clearly it doesn't work well as you are having to use a usb stick to boot. If you are satisfied, go right ahead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted March 11, 2018 Author Share Posted March 11, 2018 Well, clearly it doesn't work well as you are having to use a usb stick to boot. If you are satisfied, go right ahead. Progress has been made. For a lazy chap like me the easy route would be to use something else rather than rEFind. There is the barbarian factor at play here though, I do not like to be beaten. I uninstalled rEFind but loads of stuff was left behind. Deleting all this crud meant typing loads and loads as I have not set up to delete root stuff via a gui. I dug in and wore me fingers to the bone deleting left right and centre. Did a fresh install and rEFind shows up a couple of seconds after I press the power switch and gives me a choice of os and boots. Luverly and smooth using this "refind_linux.conf" "Boot with standard options" "ro root=/dev/nvme0n1p4" "Boot to single-user mode" "ro root=/dev/nvme0n1p4 single" "Boot with minimal options" "ro root=/dev/nvme0n1p4" However I have a intel cpu so need them pesky microcode things so have altered my "refind_linux.conf" to , "Boot with standard options" "ro root=/dev/nvme0n1p4 initrd=/intel-ucode.img initrd=/initramfs-linux.img" "Boot to single-user mode" "ro root=/dev/nvme0n1p4 single" "Boot with minimal options" "ro root=/dev/nvme0n1p4" That also boots luverly. There I will leave it for the moment as I do not want to bork it up again. I am almost sure that the first line is set up correctly and it will update any microcode stuff as and when needed automatically. That is the same instruction I used before and I did test to make sure microcode updates were added automatically. It would be nice if I could find someone with experience who would be able to tell me if I am right though. Also I would like to change line two to use the fallback image but that is for another day as tea is calling. It ain't half nice to be back home again even with all the gremlin bashing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 24, 2018 Share Posted March 24, 2018 Sorry, I didn't see your reply but I do not I have any experience with reFIND. It's nice that you fixed the boot issue though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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