My fresh start adventure

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This past Tuesday (February 27, 2024), I embarked on a new adventure (experiment?). It all started when I tried to boot up a few live images of several distributions I wanted to check out, but they all locked up after about five minutes or so, preventing me from evaluating them (In particular, I wanted to check out RebornOS, a new-to-me Arch-based distribution). I tried wiping and (re)installing Ventoy on my 128GB USB drive to no avail, then I tried ‘burning’ a live image to another USB stick with the same sad result, so I decided to try wiping my desktop computer’s M.2 SSD system drive and start over (I’ve been wanting to do it anyway, and this issue gave me an excuse) :slight_smile:.

For partition management (and system troubleshooting), I use the live image environment from System Rescue, which includes gPartEd (the GNU partition editor), and a suite of diagnostic/recovery utilities. It doesn’t support Secure boot, so I had to enter my computer’s UEFI user interface, and disable it, then I booted System Rescue up, and used the partition editor to remove all partitions on the disk. Next, I created a new 1GB (1024MB) partition, formatted with the fat32 filesystem, and I set the esp and boot flags to make it a valid EFI partition. I named it esp, and labeled it EFI so it can be recognized as such by humans. I also created a temporary partition to consume the last half of the available disk space, so Windows won’t use it when I install it next.

My next move was to re-enable Secure Boot, then install and set up Windows 11 to meet my wishes, including switching my Windows 11 user account type to ‘Local’ (I had to sign in with my Microsoft account during installation), by clicking ‘sign in with a local account’ in the Windows Settings app under Accounts, your info. I don’t want Microsoft Copilot enabled, and if it’s there in my local Microsoft 11 account, I can’t find it - I looked.

With Windows 11 installed and set up as I wanted, I went back to the UEFI interface, and disabled secure boot again so I could boot into the RebornOS live environment after removing that temporary partition I mentioned earlier. Now the RebornOS image on my Ventoy disk booted up, and worked perfectly, confirming that a completely fresh start solved my initial issue. I installed and configured RebornOS (with the KDE Plasma DE), giving it a 40GB root partition, and 100GBs for /home, leaving more than enough space for a third, and perhaps a fourth distribution, to be added later.

Since RebornOS is an Arch-based distribution, I decided to set it up with Secure Boot support (Steps follow):

  1. Enable the AUR repository for the RebornOS software manager, then install the shim-signed, sbsigntools, efitools, and refind packages.

  2. In a terminal emulator, run sudo refind-install --shim /usr/share/shim-signed/shimx64.efi --localkeys to install rEFInd in the EFI partition, and create the keys needed for MOK enrollment.

  3. Sign/resign the kernel images (/boot/vmlinuz-linux and /boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi):
    sudo sbsign --key /etc/refind.d/keys/refind_local.key --cert /etc/refind.d/keys/refind_local.crt --output /boot/vmlinuz-linux /boot/vmlinuz-linux
    sudo sbsign --key /etc/refind.d/keys/refind_local.key --cert /etc/refind.d/keys/refind_local.art --output /boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi

  4. Reboot, enabling Secure Boot in the UEFI interface. When you encounter the boot error before rEFInd loads, follow the prompts to complete MOK enrollment, then when you reboot again, rEFInd will load successfuly, and so will RebornOS (or whichever Arch-based distribution you set up for Secure Boot).

I didn’t make notes about the steps I took to enroll rEFInd with the MOK utility, so I don’t have those steps handy, sorry.

After completing enrollment, I had to hide any icons (press the minus (-) key on your keyboard, and choose ‘y’ in the resulting dialog) that didn’t load one of the installed OS’s correctly (there were multiple icons for each installed OS).

With rEFInd, Windows 11, and RebornOS installed and working correctly with Secure Boot enabled, I installed my preferred GNU/Linux distribution, Solus. It supports Secure Boot by default, so I didn’t have to do anything for that, but when I rebooted the computer after installing it, I entered the UEFI interface to make rEFInd (not rEFInd [DIRECT], or Solus) the first boot option. When I saved my changes in the UEFI interface, and rebooted again, I was very pleased to see that Solus was listed as one of the boot options in the rEFInd screen, and after hiding two (Solus) icons that didn’t work correctly, I now have three icons on my rEFInd boot screen, one for Windows 11, one for Solus Linux, and a third for RebornOS (just what I wanted).

The reason I installed the OSes in the order I used, was to see if rEFInd discovered the installed operating systems automatically without me having to do anything in its configuration file (refind.conf). Since I still have enough unused space on my M.2 SSD drive, I’ll probably set that space up for test OSes (distributions I want to check/try out). I like RebornOS a lot. It has everything I want in a distribution, including drivers for my Nvidia graphics adapter, drivers for my Wi-Fi6 USB adapter, my favorite onedrive client for GNU/Linux, and the MEGAsync desktop client, all of which work perfectly after build/installation. I may find myself switching again. Who knows,

Ernie

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Do you not know how to install W11 in a local account without using a Microsoft account? So now you have a M.2 with W11, that is compromised with Linux.

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How is Windows 11 ‘compromised’ with Linux? I’ve been dual-booting various versions of Windows with various versions of GNU/Linux since the late 1990s. I don’t understand your comment. Oh, and I do know how to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft license, I simply didn’t think about doing that until after I had Windows installed, and I learned that the newest Windows 11 update includes a lot of copilot integration, with much more to come. For now, a local account is the only way I know of to keep it out of my hair. Regarding the quoted comment above, please enlighten me,

Ernie

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Hi Ernie,
Do you have any idea what caused that initial issue?

Your approach is very thorough, and it just shows that a well planned installation is less likely to come to grief than a spontaneous effort.
Regards
Neville

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Not really. All I can figure out is that there was some sort of corruption somewhere (my guess is that it was in the UEFI partition). The issue occurred after I upgraded my UEFI BIOS system with the new patch against the logoFAIL UEFI vulnerability. Perhaps my desktop PC was infected via that vulnerability, and after installing the patch, corruption in my UEFI/EFI partition became apparent. In any case, erasing everything on the drive and starting with a clean slate seems to have resolved my issues.

Ernie

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Fair enough!! I also am guilty!!!

Let us just say. your and my use for Linux is somewhat different!!! I use Linux to compliment Windows, not as a replacement for Windows!!! I will never, dual boot Windows and Linux, except on a machine that has no other option, and most of my Linux use can be fulfilled with a VirtualBox VM. Sorry if I came over too harsh!!!

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I, too, use Linux to compliment Windows, but I choose to dual-boot them. That’s fine if you don’t though, and depending on what Microsoft does with the OS this fall, I may choose to dump Windows altogether. At present, when I finally get a cat-6 cable run from my router to my desktop PC, it will become a virtualization/file server for my home network, at which point, I’ll run Windows 11, and any distributions I want to experiment with, in virtual machines from there, and have only GNU/Linux on my two laptop PCs, from which I’ll access my VMs with a web browser.

I use VirtualBox here too, but at present I’m experimenting with multi-booting (the ability to boot three or more OSes on a single PC). I’m finding that the rEFInd boot manager works very well for that purpose, and I’ve been able to make the graphical boot menu screen look great too, not to mention that I’ve learned how to enable mouse support, so when the boot menu appears, I can click on the icon for the OS I want to boot. For me, this sort of experimentation is fun, and I learn things I didn’t know before.

Ernie

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One useful thing you can do with multibooting, if you
have more than one disk, is put your bootloader on
each disk. I do that with grub, but I am sure you could
do it with Refind. I put an EFI systdm partition on each
disk.
The benefit of that is, if you muck up one bootloader,
you can just use the bios boot table and boot from the other
disk.

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Thank you for your insight, Neville. I’ll look into doing that if I end up keeping the multi-boot configuration. Right now, it’s just another experiment for me (meaning temporary). I enjoy experimenting, and I learn things too. As I said in my original post, what I really want to end up with (if I can run a Cat-6 cable from my router to my desktop PC) is to set my desktop PC up as a LAN server using Proxmox for virtualization, and OwnCloud (or some other file server software) for local file storage.

Ernie

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Are they some distance apart? You can get up to 50m cat6 cable fitted with connectors. Beyond that you need a
reel of cable and a technician.
You should definitely use cable … it outperforms wireless.

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My computer room is near the North-East corner of my home, and the router is in my Living room, near the West end of my home. I have an 1800 Sq. Ft. Ranch-Brick style home, with a low-pitched roof, so they’re probably about 35 feet or so apart (around 11 meters?), so they’re not too far apart, but getting me (or my adult Son) up into the attic to run the cable is the issue. I can no longer accomplish the task because of medical issues, but my Son says he can do it, if there’s enough vertical clearance to get over my computer room, but I think I’ll have to find someone younger (and a bit less stocky) to be able to get the job done, so time will tell. My low-pitched roof is the main reason we use Wi-Fi here. ATT supplies my Wi-Fi6 router, so I get pretty good bandwidth, but, as you say, it still doesn’t compare with a cable connection.

Ernie

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This is an update on my adventure:

After running RebornOS on my desktop computer for a week, I decided to add it to my primary laptop PC (I use it more than I do my desktop these days), along with Windows 11, and Solus. I started by resizing the partitions on my laptop to make room for another OS, using GPartEd from my copy of System Rescue, then I added a 40GB partition for RebornOS’s system (root), and another for user space(/home). I like to keep a separate user space partition for each distribution/OS to prevent configuration confusion. After using Reborn on my laptop for a few days, I received an email from the rebornOS forums, informing users about an issue on the live image regarding KDE6, so I rebooted into RebornOS, and updated the system, and now I’m using KDE6 on Reborn. It looks great. Everything seems to work as I expect. I did have to re-configure a few of the desktop widgets I use, to make them look as they did before the update. Other than that, KDE6 looks good to go, so I won’t be surprised if more distributions begin to offer the update soon.

Ernie

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Hi Ernie,
I looked up reborn os. I notice it has a rollback facility.
That could be helpful in a rolling release distro.
Only negative ( to me ) is that it uses systemd the same as Arch.

Regards
Neville

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It is based on Arch, after all, and while I understand that many users dislike systemd, even though it seems to go against the most fundamental GNU/Linux philosophy of “Build a small thing that does one job very well, then put many small things together to do big things”, for me, it works well, and I like RebornOS. The more I use the OS, the better I like it. I may be becoming a RebornOS convert :slight_smile:.

Ernie

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