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Rollback RX vs GRUB

Just a heads up on the USB sticks ... I bought a pack of 4 HP 4 GB sticks that will not boot. They are fine for storage, but you can't make live boot drives with them. Might be prudent to check one out before you commit to all 8.
 
Did you try going to disk management and completely nuking and rebuilding their partition tables/drive formats? I mean, a boot sector's a boot sector, it should work.
 
a boot sector's a boot sector, it should work.
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Earlier, I had Cinnamon sharing the c drive and some other distro on a 16gb stick. All I had to do was tweak the bios on startup to boot the stick, otherwise I got the usual Win/Cin grub. About to confirm that...
 
5:37 PM: Wrote the above on Win7, rebooted with Magia DVD, installed to flash card via USB1, put its grub on the flash. Confirmed that original grub still works correctly and that Mageia boots if I tell bios to do so.

8:54 PM: Another pointless miracle accomplished! For poking in the dark, I must have learned a lot about guessing.

Magia is also purty groovy, but it's too slow off a stick through USB1 to truly appreciate. I'll get those USB2 ports when a boat from China arrives in Arizona, then we'll see if this idea is any good.
 
This is my real question that I haven't asked correctly:

I can tell that tons of effort go into assembling these ISOs and most of them make installation and use of their distro to be as simple and informative as possible. It certainly seems to me that they're all competing with each other for me to choose one of them, even though a lot of them are so slick it's nearly impossible to decide.

What I don't understand is why. What are they trying to accomplish with these incredible efforts? Is one of them going to be the winner? And when? And what does the winner get?
 
Why do people climb mountains? Or Swim the Channel? Why do Poets dream? Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? ;)

Maybe a quote from the Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) might help explain.

MARIAN

But it's lost you your rank, your lands. It's made you a hunted outlaw when you might have lived in comfort and security. What's your reward for all this?

ROBIN HOOD

Reward? You just don't understand, do you?
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I'm sure that there is an economic incentive for some, but many just participate for the love of it.
 
So while 99.99% of every question ever asked can be answered with the word 'money,' I've found the 00.01% that can't. That explains everything...
 
jefboyardee said:
So while 99.99% of every question ever asked can be answered with the word 'money,' I've found the 00.01% that can't. That explains everything...
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That is a horrible outlook on humanity. Not that I don't agree somewhat, but it really depends on the individual. I grew up without much money, but my grandfather, who suffered during the great depression, developed an unhealthy need to save. He amassed a good bit of wealth but never spent a cent on himself up to and including things like dental care or comfortable clothing.

My mother inherited half of his estate and did nothing with it as she was used to getting by with very little. When she passed and left a third of that to me, I gave it away (okay it was to family, but I didn't want it.)

I have friends who's idea of success is how much they make. They a miserable S.O.B.'s and I feel sorry for them. Personally I think money causes much more problems than it solves.

Linux was born out of the love of the challenge and creating something through community effort. Some think it's a failure until it turns into a huge commercial enterprise. Given the state of the distros and the development community today, I think it is a resounding success.
 
That is a horrible outlook on humanity.
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I had trouble with it the first time I heard it too, can't remember where, but I've since found it to be true, horrible or not.

Linux was born out of the love of the challenge and creating something through community effort.
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Oh well... I doubt if that will ever make sense to me, but it's fun to dabble in this stuff.

Another curiosity: on the assumption that I'll soon have eight flash sticks, each with a bootable distro, when I enter bios, it'll just say blah blah USB device eight times, with no differentiation provided about what they are. Is there a way to uniquely label them that'll be reflected in bios?
 
The bios identifies each by its hardware descriptor. I don't know if you can change that. But, if you get devices from different manufacturers you get unique identifiers.
 

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jefboyardee said:
This is my real question that I haven't asked correctly:

I can tell that tons of effort go into assembling these ISOs and most of them make installation and use of their distro to be as simple and informative as possible. It certainly seems to me that they're all competing with each other for me to choose one of them, even though a lot of them are so slick it's nearly impossible to decide.

What I don't understand is why. What are they trying to accomplish with these incredible efforts? Is one of them going to be the winner? And when? And what does the winner get?
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MS pretty much killed off any competition during its heydays. So we only get different flavors of Windows!

On the other hand, MS can't kill off Linux, due to it being Open Source.

Fedora, for example, strives for freedom and transparency, while at the same time acting as a test bed for the incredibly profitable Red Hat Enterprise distribution. It has gravitas.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, is a commercially sponsored endeavour that's designed to bring a shiny, corporate sheen to the Linux desktop. It's the head of the new wave.

Distributions with a community focus, such as Debian, Slackware, Mageia or Gentoo, scratch their contributors' various itches in the hope that they're scratching yours too.

Then there are the likes of PCLinuxOS and Crunchbang. They're the result of one person's vision, and their popularity is a result of others appreciating and sharing many of the same ideas as the author.

I guess it does boils down to choice. For some real fun, try Linux From Scratch when you're ready.
 
Plug them in one at a time?
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That's what I have going now; Mint on the hd, mageian on a stick. That works but it's not fair to the stick side, especially now with my current USB1.0 ports. The 2.0 ports will be inconveniently placed behind my tower, so I thought it'd be easier to leave them all plugged in... no matter.
 
The bios identifies each by its hardware descriptor.
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To confirm that, I installed Netrunner on another stick. Sure enough, in the bios startup, one says Kingston, the other says SanDisk -- that's all the guidance I'll get.

I picked Netrunner out of the blue and this review:
It's a major surprise that this distro lies so low in DistroWatch's popularity table. If you haven't heard of it, think of Netrunner as Ubuntu without Unity.

Netrunner is based on Kubuntu, but that doesn't mean it's just another Ubuntu-based distro that has slapped KDE instead of Unity.
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It ain't bad either. Still amazed at the work that goes into these things.
 
jefboyardee said:
Still amazed at the work that goes into these things.
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No doubt you've seen the Olympic Games haven't you? Where a hell of a lot of work, dedication and effort goes into something by a lot of people, that has no cash reward whatsoever.

But if you can get a sponsor behind you, like say Mark Shuttleworth and the Chinese government, who knows what's going to happen.
 
Is there a way to make Windows or DOS or Bios identify a drive that's formatted as Ext4? Disk Management just calls it 'healthy' but has know idea what's in there.
 
jefboyardee said:
Is there a way to make Windows or DOS or Bios identify a drive that's formatted as Ext4? Disk Management just calls it 'healthy' but has know idea what's in there.
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Yes you can, but you need to install a Windows tool called "EXT2 Explore" I believe. You'll find it on SourceForge. Same for getting Windows to read a Mac HPFS formatted drive, you have to install Mac Drive. On other hand most current Linux OSs can read many formats including Mac without having to install anything.
 
I've just about abandoned Windows altogether, my wife is full-time in Linux now. Not from any Open Source purity standpoint, Linux (Mint, PearOS and PCLinuxOS variously) just runs better and is more stable than Windows 7 or 8. Going back to Windows 8 was like wading through treacle. Also, no need for Anti-Virus, and a proper firewall out of the box.
 
About a year ago, me and XP weren't getting along anymore, so I bought a PC with W8, hated it, returned it the next day. That led me back to XP, dabbling with Linux, trashing my drive, buying a W7 CD, liking it but trying more Linux, trashing my drive, reinstalling W7 once or twice, and more Linux dabbling.

I finally figured out how to dual boot and un-dual boot, but I just can't feel Linux drawing me over. I'm about to have five distros going at once; one sharing the hard drive and four on sticks. If I don't find a distro to change my mind, I guess it'll all go away someday.

But I do agree the Linux behaves more reliably than Windoze. So W9 will be the telling point for me, assuming it happens someday.
 
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