nanook

@phantomwise @SpiderUnderUrBed Every program on your system has “kernel access”, it’s called “syscalls”, but actually being able to modify the kernel, that is another matter.

@MachineFab812 @SpiderUnderUrBed even if you have steamOS, what keeps you from downloading kernels from kernel.org and building?

@Godort @SpiderUnderUrBed That’s really the conundrum, in an open source kernel, where can you put anti-cheat that someone else can’t readily pull out?

@potentiallynotfelix You’re most welcome!

@potentiallynotfelix Ya gotta love it!

@Attacker94 The boot block pointing to grub is what gets overwritten, grub itself in /boot/efi doesn’t. You can fix either though with either boot repair or boot from a usb thumb drive, mount the partitions on /mnt and subdirectories,mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev, /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts, and then mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc and /sys /mnt/sys, cp /etc/resolv.conf to /mnt/etc/resolv.conf, chroot to /mnt, and then grub-install /dev/sda or whatever the drive is. Not a big deal. And this only happens if you install Windows AFTER you have installed Linux.

@Rubanski if you have mdraid partitions, you also should add bootdegraded=true to the grub command line so the system will still boot even if a disk fails and an array is in the degraded mode.

@over_clox You are most welcome. This is one aspect I love about Linux, damned near everything is adjustable. Those adjustments aren’t necessarily well organized, but they are usually there, somewhere…

@over_clox You can adjust this with hdparm:

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda (or whatever the drive name)
Will prevent spin down altogether.

hdparm -B 1-127 /dev/sda
Will allow spin down with ‘1’ being the most aggressive power management and 127 the
least.

I put these in /etc/rc.local so that it gets run by systemd at boot-up.

@just_another_person @Rubanski On most modern systems neither Windows nor Linux is going to hurt each other’s boot record because usually on a dual boot system you’re going to launch grub out of the boot block which is going to them find and mount the UEFI partition which is a fat-32 partition usually mounted on /boot/efi by Linux, and then grub is going to continue from a directory within /boot/efi, windows similarly will have a directory there, and grub if it finds both will present a menu at boot. Since both use separate directories on this UEFI System partition, one should not interfere with the other unless the partition is too small and you run out of disk space. I usually size my EFI partition at 512MB and that’s always been more than sufficient for multiple operating systems. If you re-install WIndows, it will overwrite the boot block with it’s own boot loader, but restoring it with grub will you back to where you were. If you are a real glutton for punishment, you can setup the Windows boot loader to chain load grub, this works as I have actually done it, more as a matter of curiosity than anything else. But I prefer to use Grub as the first boot loader as it’s faster and less prone to exploding.

@Rubanski If it’s booting into emergency mode, there are usually one of three issues, kernel is corrupt, a file system can not be mounted read/write, and this can be because of file system corruption or in the case of mdraid, because a raid device failed to self-assemble, or initramfs is broken. The easy way to fix most of these is to use an automated utility called boot repair, you download the ISO then burn to a thumb drive, then when you run into this kind of problem boot off the thumb drive. I’d start by trying to determine which of these it is, if you get into emergency mode then you at least have a shell prompt, try typing dmesg to see if there are any errors relating to the kernel, then check if all of the partitions are mounted and if they are all mounted read/write. If one or more is mounted read only this usually means that the automatic fsck found errors it can not fix and needs a manual run, in which case try fsck -f -y /dev/sdxx or /dev/nvmexnxpx, which ever the case may be (hard drive verses SSD). If this was the issue after the fsck successfully repairs the file system you should be able to boot successfully. If not, and nothing kernel related shows up in dmesg, then probably your initramfs has gotten hurt. In this case since you are new to Linux, boot repair is the easiest way to fix it. You can also fix manually but that is more complex, however if you need instructions on how to do this let me know and I will elaborate. Even doing so manually though requires another bootable Linux media, does not have to be boot repair, a popos install USB will also do.

@carzian I paid about $60 for a used unlocked Galaxy Android phone, whatever the dollar equivalent of 890 euros is, it’s out of my budget.

@potentiallynotfelix Well flash to an older and see how it goes. I’ve seen some wired bios issues. I’ve got an i7=6850k machine on an Asus motherboard, and after I flashed to the latest bios, the USB power strobed on and off every few seconds so keyboard and mouse would work then not work then work then not work. I thought something was broken with hardware but then found others had the same issue with the most current BIOS, flashed to one release earlier and all good.

@potentiallynotfelix Ok bet of luck. I’ve had all sorts of weird issues with systemd as of late, but not sure how many of those are inherent to systemd itself and how many are Ubuntu’s config of same.

@potentiallynotfelix As a diagnostic, I would suggest trying shutting them down by ssh in and then using systemctl to shut them down, if that works then you know the issue is with cockpit. If it hangs even when systemd is asked to halt then I would consider reverting to the previous bios and see if the problem persists.

@tkw8 I thought brew was a MacIntosh thing?

@AprilShowers The hardware surely is very nice, unfortunately I can’t justify spending 3x what my laptop costs for a phone.

@robber Even though I said yes in the bios, cpuid still shows max id of 64 which
is reasonable for an 18 core 36 thread CPU. So it seems the Linux kernel figures it out on it’s own.

@original_reader Here I’ve got a mix of Ubuntu, Debian, Zorin, PopOS, Fedora, Alma, Rocky8, MxLinux, Mint,and Kali, but the primary work horse is Ubuntu.

@LandedGentry You can partition a thumb drive and install just as if it was a hard drive. I create thumb drives this way mainly for restoration of a system is something gets broken to where it can’t boot, kernel corrupted, initramfs, etc.