Dual Boot Workstation - Windows 11 & Ubuntu 22.04

@davee FYI @frogandtoad I use a Mac and have a commercial product Parallels. I keep a Win11 and Ubuntu 'on standby' in case I need to use one of them to test something. I tried Oracle in the past and had difficulty with the configuration. Parallels is very easy to use. Another alternative is VMWare, it is a competitor to Parallels and is very similar. I don't know if those two products exist for Windows but they may. For a while I was running MacOS running Parallels running Windows running Wine running an app that had no other way to run. It is very infrequently used.

@davee

Posted by: @davee

Hi @frogandtoad,

  Thanks for your info on virtual systems.

  It was quite a whie ago, and very short of 'horsepower' of all computing varieties, so I had presumed things have changed.

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More recently, I briefly started to read about Docker .. and quickly got very bored and lost ...

I got the impression it was more of an 'industrial server'  packaging system .. great if you wanted to run three different bits of stable software on the same large server box for 100+ users, assuming you liked spending your life as a 'Butler' managing and feeding servers, and presumably getting paid "adequately" for the pleasure/misery.

As someone who likes to flit around etc, is the only user, ...  and not looking for a new career .. I moved on.

Maybe a mistake on my part ... did I miss the obvious, perhaps read the wrong stuff?

It's hard to say... perhaps? 😉

As I stated, DOCKER virtualises applications, so here is one example of many... let's say if you've ever set up a LAMP system for website development, by using DOCKER you can download a complete LAMP template and make some slight config adjustments for your environment, and then test to your hearts content.  What?, you need multiple LAMP servers just in case one fails? no problem, just implement another one in a few seconds... What? you also need an NGINX load balancer or reverse proxy? no problem... download and load balance them too... the possibilities are endless, and they can also communicate with eachother.

Posted by: @davee

VMWare and Oracle I was 'vaguely' aware of .. I think it was Oracle I tried. They would heve been on my list if I decide to try VMs sometime, though the commercial strings to both give me a slightly uneasy feeling, eventhough I realise they have versions in my budget range (£0)

If I may ask, what commercial aspects of these virtual environments are you worried about?

Posted by: @davee

proxmox hadn't registered on my radar .. and your comments make it look attractive ... I hadn't presently planned to reach the horsepower heights you are moving to, but I will be interested to know how it goes.

Will do, but please also note, that it doesn't take much to need more horsepower... for example, I plan on setting up in proxmox, many O/S's / Servers for testing, as well as dedicated virtual appliances for my network such as mqtt server, pfsense, openNAS or trueNAS, piHole, LAMP, etc...  this is what a homelab is all about 😀

Posted by: @davee

I am aware, but by no means keeping up with, the way in which each generation of Intel and AMD devices are not only quicker, and sometimes have more cores, but also they sneak in extra instructions and capabilities. Have you had specific problems because your processor didn't have a "capability" that came with a later generation? I think you will be about 6 generations in front of me, to say nothing of a lot quicker!!

(Again, please don't go any trouble .. just if something occurred to you.)

No specific problem, but I love working with Blender3D, and also other CAD programs.  Although the 4 core i7 (2nd gen) still works ok, I'm unable to run too many applications concurrently in my virtual machines, and 3D rendering performance is not that great - I could purchase a very expensive 3D graphics card to help with rendering, but that doesn't help with the number of virtual machines I can run - So the best outcome is for me to upgrade to a cpu and memory model that can handle at least 6 virtual machines running concurrently, and also having the 12 cores that the Blender rending engine is able to make use of 🙂

Cheers

Hi @frogandtoad ,

Thanks for the comprehensive answer .. I hope it didn't distract you too much from what you intended to do.

Docker ... Looks like I read the wrong 'getting started' or whatever it was ... I just have vague recollections of endless config stuff to understand before it did anything ... but the grey cell was never that good at remembering, my patience for systems that don't do at least something useful out of the box is rather short, and it's certainly not improved with age.

If you already know a URL or two of something simple to read and follow .. maybe your go to when you do something different .. that would be great ... if not, please don't worry, I can Google it .

.....

Commercial aspects of Vmware Oracle.. ... only a low down gut feeling/prejudice, nothing substantial ... mainly that next week's board meeting might decide to withdraw the free version ... kind of personal version of why Sun's OpenOffice apparently got forked into LibreOffice etc when Oracle acquired it. And also past encounters with 'crippled' software that leave you wondering why you bothered.

So probably all unjustified prejudice, but something 'free' of such concerns automatically gets a gold star.

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Thanks for the general comments about processors, etc. Interesting you mentioned Blender ... not so much for the program itself, as 2D and 3D design are still rocks I have yet to peer under, though its on the 'One day, I should ... list' .., but presently, because I can appreciate it needs a fair bit of horsepower to be 'responsive' in the way you want for a CAD program. Clearly, you do not feel the virtual machine environment is significantly robbing you of performance.

Best wishes and thanks again,

Dave

@davee 

Posted by: @davee

Hi @frogandtoad ,

Thanks for the comprehensive answer .. I hope it didn't distract you too much from what you intended to do.

Docker ... Looks like I read the wrong 'getting started' or whatever it was ... I just have vague recollections of endless config stuff to understand before it did anything ... but the grey cell was never that good at remembering, my patience for systems that don't do at least something useful out of the box is rather short, and it's certainly not improved with age.

If you already know a URL or two of something simple to read and follow .. maybe your go to when you do something different .. that would be great ... if not, please don't worry, I can Google it .

Hi Dave, after many years of IT and researching, you get to find the sites you love the most, so indeed, I do have a good site that is a wealth of knowledge!  In my opinion (and I guess many others who follow him too), "Jay" from "LearnLinuxTV" has  got to be the best Linux educator on the planet, hands down!! - Please subscribe to this gentleman's channel and reap the rewards from the knowledge he provides!

    LearnLinuxtv

Posted by: @davee

Commercial aspects of Vmware Oracle.. ... only a low down gut feeling/prejudice, nothing substantial ... mainly that next week's board meeting might decide to withdraw the free version ... kind of personal version of why Sun's OpenOffice apparently got forked into LibreOffice etc when Oracle acquired it. And also past encounters with 'crippled' software that leave you wondering why you bothered.

So probably all unjustified prejudice, but something 'free' of such concerns automatically gets a gold star.

Fair enough, I can actually relate to that in the IT space, especially with Oracle!!

Posted by: @davee

Thanks for the general comments about processors, etc. Interesting you mentioned Blender ... not so much for the program itself, as 2D and 3D design are still rocks I have yet to peer under, though its on the 'One day, I should ... list' .., but presently, because I can appreciate it needs a fair bit of horsepower to be 'responsive' in the way you want for a CAD program. Clearly, you do not feel the virtual machine environment is significantly robbing you of performance.

Best wishes and thanks again,

Dave

No worries, Dave... but note that as far as virtual machines are concerned, one or two is fine, but it's when you need more than that, then that's when you actually are robbed of performance, and in this day and age, I run virtual machines daily (as we speak), and the newer O/S's all require greater resources as well - I also forgot to mention that the later versions of Blender no longer work on Windows 7 that I have, due to now requiring a greater version of python no longer supported, so installing a newer O/S or virtualising is also helpful in this regard.

I hope this clears some of this stuff up, but please don't hesitate to ask additional questions you may have, and I will try my best to answer them.

Cheers

Hi @frogandtoad,

   Thanks yet again.

Jay is a new one on me ... may be as I have 'lightly dabbled' in Linux over a long time, just finding out enough to do something, but the bills have largely been paid by "cassette tape /EPROM - no OS",  CP/M. Dos and Windows .... choice depending upon era. I've just added to my subscribe list... all I need is time to watch it ...

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As for software versions, I try to keep pretty much up to date ... admittedly I haven't yet tried Win 11, so all Wins are  Win 10

I have only got 1 machine with TPM to meet MS's wishes for Win 11 and that is a laptop which runs Windows fine, but hangs with Ubuntu (18, 20 and 22 versions) and Kubuntu at least once a day! (I have tried every version of Kernel command line options I can think of, with no useful effect.) I suspect it is an AMD Ryzen bug, but as it works fine with Windows, which is what is was sold with, I have never felt I will get much sympathy under warranty. So I think it will be Win 10, and maybe free upgrade to Win 11 for most of its life.

I am aware it is (sometimes?) possible to override MS's Win 11 requirement list, but whilst they maintain security updates on Win 10, I am inclined to forget that possibility, whilst MS gets the bug list a little shorter.

Best wishes, Dave

@davee I was unable to install with the ISO burned with BalenaEtcher, but it seems to be working using a ISO copied to the USB stick with Rufus.  I'll report back when I get today's attempt loaded.

@davee, @dronebot-workshop

Both the Windows and Linux USB sticks were not bootable when they had the ISO file installed using Balena Etcher.  But if I used Rufus they were both fine.  My load of Windows had a somewhat different series of screens than was shown on Bill's video.  Not a huge difference, but some of the "questions" he was asked didn't show up on my install, and several apps had a different look as well.  In particular the "update" window was quite different.  The part where BirLocker was to be turned off was a good bit different.  My BitLocker did not automatically start, but was waiting for me to "activate" it.  I guess I could have left it in that state, but went ahead and activated it, then turned it off.

But in the end I got Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS loaded and running.

@dronebot-workshop

Just finished setting up my dual-boot NUC, but I can't seem to pick a "Port."  That field is always grayed out even when I have the RasPi Pico W selected as my board.  I do get a "ding" from the system when I plug or unplug the Pico W from the USB port.

Hi @codecage,

  Good to see you found Rufus helpful. Personally, I think I would have ignored Bitlocker, unless it was for computer with confidential information that was likely to get 'lost', such as laptop used for air travel.

 As for the latest issue with the USB port, I am sorry if I am mentioning the obvious, but have you tried with both Windows and Ubuntu?

  I haven't played with an R-Pi Pico yet (and I have a homebrew Intel box, not NUC), but with other odd 'boxes' with USB interfaces, both Win and Ubuntu have had problems ... but different ones... 

Windows, seemed to be a case of trial & error tracking down a driver that worked ... if only because I couldn't find any way of debugging it.

Whilst Ubuntu had clash with a preassigned Id ... that is it started, but aborted.

I am not sure ... I think I used "tail -20 \var\log\syslog" to spot the start and abort ... then a bit more Googling to find the fix.

Good luck, Dave

@codecage, et, al...

Posted by: @codecage

@dronebot-workshop

Just finished setting up my dual-boot NUC, but I can't seem to pick a "Port."  That field is always grayed out even when I have the RasPi Pico W selected as my board.  I do get a "ding" from the system when I plug or unplug the Pico W from the USB port.

This doesn't solve your specific COM PORT issue, however, I recently cane across a fantastic tool that I'm sure you will all love!

...it's called "Ventoy"!

Basically, it is a small program that you load onto a USB drive of some sort, which allows you to then load multiple IOS, IMG, etc... type files onto it, and when you boot from it, it provides you with a menu to choose which ISO, IMG etc... file you want to boot from... very cool... here is a random link I just chose as it was recent:

Using Ventoy - A USB Boot Drive Tool

In essence, you no longer need to reformat sticks every time, and can have multiple versions of ISO's, IMG's etc... stored on just one stick, saving stick space 😀

Cheers

Hi @codecage,

  Looks like Bitlocker can be a bit "too effective"? Spoiler from the article ... Make sure you know the key to unlock it, before rebooting after latest security update

Latest Windows security update is locking users out of their PCs (msn.com)

Of course, I can only take what the article says at face value ... I have no way of verifying it, and I haven't got Win 11 or Bitlocker in use, so I haven't seen the alleged problem myself.

Take care my friend. Dave

@davee Bitlocker is a very effective tool for preventing non state actors access to your disk. What that means is if you don't have the key the data is lost, the recovery command then becomes 'format'.

Hi Ron @zander,

I haven't used Bitlocker or Win 11, so I maybe missing something. Previous versions of Windows could also also encrypt disc contents, so I am not sure what has changed. Perhaps Bitlocker is harder to crack than its predecessors.

So far as I am aware BitLocker encrypts the contents of the disc ...  useful if the disc contains information of say commercial, military or data protection significance, that is liable to be stolen, as it means the contents cannot be read by simply putting the disc in another machine (assuming the encryption is secure, which it probably is from most bad actors.) For certain users, e.g. air travellers who carry a laptop, then this seems a useful precaution.

However, if your machine is successfully attacked across a network (e.g. Internet), with the attacker impersonating a user with administrator account (which is commonly the case for most/all users under Windows), or for someone who manages to login to a stolen machine by some means, then I suspect the encryption will not make any difference.

So far as I can see, Bitlocker is useful protection for some people, but an extra failure mechanism with little benefit for others.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? I try to take my own security seriously, but any security mechanism must provide a significant security improvement, not just be a hindrance to me.

(The article I pointed to refers to a report on Microsoft's recent security upgrade which says that when rebooting after installing the upgrade, Bitlocker is demanding the keys ... which many users may not be expecting or able to provide, as they are not needed in everyday usage... hence possibly finding themselves at the format recovery position you mention.)

Best wishes, Dave

Hi @frogandtoad,

   I just watched the "ventoy" video ... looks useful, and in my price range (free). Hopefully, a good pointer!

Clearly there are a few things to be aware of when using it, and some of the comments below said they had problems with some programs, so I'll be keeping a few sticks for the awkward ones.

I'll try it next time I need to make a USB stick image ... and have a large coffee ready for a lot of  pause and rewind to capture the dos and don'ts from the video.

Best wishes, Dave

@davee Sorry Dave, I am not sure where or if we are disagreeing. Bitlocker has been around for ages, no change there for Win 11. The issue is some people encrypted their disk years ago and have no idea where the key is and now Msft is asking for the key for some sort of upgrade or whatever. You are absolutely right, most people don't need it. I suspect there are some 'ordinary' folks who turned it on years ago and think it protects them all the time. As you know it does not protect them at all once the OS is running. Cracking one of the admin ids is much simpler and once you login you have access to all the data. IIRC, it works in conjunction with a security chip on the motherboard much like Apple has been using for decades.