On 22/08/2014 18:05, Joe wrote:
I couldn't be bothered messing about with dual boot, so I carry a pocket USB hard drive containing a sid installation, and also have a sid on a VM in Windows. I use the latter for Linux-only software, and the former for using public wi-fi.
First, may I thank everyone for putting some thoughts down about Wheezy on an HP laptop with UEFI. I've responded to this message, specifically, because, from further work I've done, it seems that
(i) Wheezy/UEFI isn't a (needn't be a) problem,(ii) the trackpad issue may either not arise because some of these are sold with Ubuntu (and, presumably, work), or may be solvable with a different GUI install,
but ...(iii) Dual booting with Windows (this has W8.1) does seem, generally, to be problematic; apparently W8 is thought to revert bootloader configurations to 'Windows only' - as a prudent security measure - but with the result that Debian is invisible to bootloader (whether grub or not) at each restart. (Nothing I looked at explained how Ubuntu gets around that, if it does - or even if that is actually the problem.) I searched quite a lot for more details about Debian, even Linux generally, dual-booting with W8.1, but the only returns I found were describing the difficulties. I thought there was a recent thread here, as well, talking about the problems, but my searching has failed to pick it up so far, though we've an archive of deleted messages so I'll have a look through those.
I would like to retain Windows 8.1, so I was pleased to see this suggestion of booting from USB (a 1G stick would do, if Wheezy can be installed to something that small) and I could resize the W8.1 partitions to leave enough space for the D7 applications I want to run. Will definitely think about this.
The suggestion of swapping the HD is good - happily changed many HDs on laptops but those laptops were all put together with screws. Two cheaper netbook devices that we have do not seem to have any screws, and I guess at this price this machine might be similar, and it's less clear how such 'click-close' plastic chassis can be opened, if they can at all.
Very grateful for the ideas; I'm very tempted to order one and try the text applications, another good suggestion that someone mentioned.
regards, Ron