Mike Pelley's Musings

This might be the “new normal” with UEFI BIOSes but when I updated the BIOS of my IdeaPad Y50 the GRUB2 boot manager was gone and replaced by Windows 10’s boot loader.

Even the upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10 didn’t mess with GRUB. (Kudo’s Microsoft – Credit where credit is due!)

Don’t have a cow, man!

It was, of course fixed by booting to Linux Mint 17.2 LiveCD. Unfortunately, I still cannot get the “normal” GRUB fix to work. You know:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo chroot /mnt
sudo update-grub2

Which gives the error:

/usr/sbin/grub-probe:error:failed to get canonical path of /cow.

Much Googling… Many hits on “I have the same problem…”

The easy fix? Use Boot-Repair. It isn’t included in the LiveCD so you have to download it with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

I ended up having to clean up GRUB – how many different entries CAN it find? All of them, apparently. But, this is better than having to do a re-install….

By now two of four of the other Windows 7 machines that are turned on have not yet gotten the update for Windows 10. Yesterday I manually updated my main machine (Lenovo Y50) by going to Microsoft and downloading the upgrade tool. I was too impatient to wait for Windows Update to do its thing.  The upgrade tool is available in Windows 10 32-bit Upgrade and Windows 10 64-bit Upgrade versions. You can also download the Windows 10 ISO.

Of course, you need to have a valid copy of Windows 🙂

As I started to say, two of the four as the old HP G62 (a Intel Pentium Dual-Core T4200 – you know, the Penryn generation Core 2 Duo that they renamed) has received its “reservation.” That upgrade has started.

I finally got a chance to more fully try out Diablo III and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.

Future Soldier worked just fine – I couldn’t see any difference between running it under Windows 8.0/8.1 and 10.

Diablo III also worked fine with one strange anomaly – If I use the Windows key to jump out of the game I can’t get back into the game. Well, sort of. I can get back into the game but I keep seeing the desktop. Weird.

Once I get the old HP upgraded I’ll post what Windows 10 works like on some lesser hardware…

I just finished upgrading my Lenovo Y50-70 install from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Of course, I run Linux Mint 17.2 as my primary OS but need Windows for VMware ESXi administration and, of course, running some games. Diablo III and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier are my current favourites.

Anyway, unlike other  Windows upgrades this one did NOT blow away GRUB! Of course, I had to keep an eye on things as the upgrade was underway – multiple reboots – which would have left me booting into Mint – making the upgrade even longer. They weren’t kidding when they said multiple reboots and it would take a while.

I still have to see if everything is working – so far WiFi, Ethernet Sound, nVidia drivers, touchpad, etc. all seem fine. Still need to see if Diablo and Ghost Recon work, though…

I also found out that my VMware Workstation installation worked just fine as well after the upgrade as well!

Not bad, Microsoft!

For the longest time I have been looking for the correct way to use my Lenovo Y50’s hotkey (Fn + F6) to disable my touchpad. I hate the when I’m typing and my cursor decides to jump somewhere…

I found scripts to disable the Synaptic touchpad but this isn’t what I really wanted. They worked but still…

Anyway, after yet another Google search I found the answer! The solution is located my Linux Mint Post Lenovo Y50 – Turn off Touchpad and the answer by ecola:

Here is the Answer:

gksu pluma /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb

Add this at the end of the Lenovo section:

# Lenovo 20378
keyboard:dmi:bvn*:bvr*:svnLENOVO*:pn*20378*:pvr*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_f3=f21 # Fn+F6 (toggle touchpad)

Save the file, then:

sudo udevadm hwdb --update

sudo reboot

Works just perfect! Thanks ecola!

Like most people with a smart phone I take many photos. Maybe like other people I forget about these pictures shortly after they are taken. Here is one that I found from Paris, June 2014.

My son, Cameron, just did his second Shave for the Brave. Donations can still be made here.

And this was the process…

Before…

…during…

…and after

Well done, son! I am so proud of you!

Heaven is where:

The police are British
The chefs are Italian
The mechanics are German
The lovers are French
and it’s all organized by the Swiss

Hell is where:

The police are German
The chefs are British
The mechanics are French
The lovers are Swiss
and it’s all organized by the Italians

This week I decided to give my “old” desktop to my son. He loves gaming. He has an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 and a PlayStation 4. (And a Wii if that counts.) Of course, he has now, in due course, had decided that PC gaming is what he wants to do now. The old desktop was just sitting there turned off most of the time. Basically a backup if/when my laptop didn’t work. Or, more likely, when I did something that made my laptop not work.

He has a Dell Inspiron 5000 series but, of course, with the Intel HD4400 graphics he wasn’t going to get far using that. Mindcraft didn’t like it very much. I hate to think what H1Z1 would play like.

Anyway, my old desktop was (is?) an Intel i5-3450 CPU @ 3.10GHz. That is the one that has four core but no hyperthreading. It has 8 GB dual channel Corsair RAM and a 500 GB WD Blue hard drive. The only thing that it was missing was a decent video card.

My son bought using money he had saved up an EVGA GeForce GTX 750 1GB card. That is the one without the “Ti.” From what I read the extra money for the Ti was not worth it.

Since the desktop was formerly “mine” it had Windows 7 and Linux Mint installed. Both were old installations with many programs installed, uninstalled, etc. Clearly a fresh install of Windows 7 was called for.

I am used to installing Linux. In fact, in getting my new Lenovo Y50 set up with Mint I installed it more than a few times (thank you Secure Boot – and me not reading everything). It was annoying but since it only took about 7-8 minutes to install Mint it was no big deal.

Installing Windows 7 was something else. I started at 7:00PM by inserting the DVD and rebooting. (Yes, I should have copied the image to a USB key but I didn’t think about that until writing this – I don’t usually install Windows 7). Actually, the installation was on an original WD Raptor 36GB 10,000RPM SATA drive. That was, and still is, a really fast mechanical drive. What I didn’t realize is that Windows and the nVidia driver software would eventually take up 32GB. More on that later.

Anyway, once the installation was complete the next step is, of course, to install the patches. With Mint installing the patches is easy: “yum update; yum dist-upgrade” and two or three minutes later you are all up to day.

With Windows it was run Windows Update; wait seemingly forever for Windows Update to (a) find out what needed to be downloaded, (b) to download the patches and (c) to actually install the patches. And the, of course, reboot. (I have BellAliant FibreOp 3.0 which gives me 150 Mbit/s download.

By 10:30 it seems I must have downloaded more than 1 GB of patches. I was tired so I ran Windows Update again and went to bed.

When I got up in the morning I checked the machine and more patches had come down and needed to be installed. Thankfully, for now, that was the last of it – for now.

In short, unlike a Windows 7 install, I was shocked by the number of patches that had to be installed. Especially by the fact that I apparently had to (a) install a slew of patches before (b) getting the new version of Windows Update that would allow me to install SP1. Maybe I should have looked into downloading SP1 separately which may have saved me a bunch of time downloading, installing and rebooting. But I didn’t think about that since when I use apt-get it gets me updated right away.

Back to the 36GB Raptor drive: Obviously there was no space for much more than swap left on that drive so it had to go. I replaced it with a 500GB WD Blue drive I had left over from upgrading one of my NASes. The nice thing is that WD provides  Acronis True Image WD Edition Software so transferring my many hours of installing Windows 7 was simply install True Image and run it. Easy, peasy.

Wonderful tweet graph of “Je suis Charlie” at http://srogers.cartodb.com/viz/123be814-96bb-11e4-aec1-0e9d821ea90d/embed_map