On 30 June 2014 11:54, Sundaram KR <[email protected]> wrote: >>I want to purchase a Dell laptop... I am a regular Ubuntu user. > > Recently Dell went private, and Microsoft is a major investor. I tried > installing Linux on Dell Optiplex series and gave up after tearing my hair > out. It is painful. > Dell has discontinued Linux desktop offerings, so if you want a Linux desktop > go to some other company brand or best assemble with Intel boards from the > market. They are 25% cheaper and guaranteed to run Linux (all flavours) > smoothly.
I recently installed Linux Mint Debian Edition LMDE on my friends machine which was running Windows 8 . The windows which came by default came with lot of bloatware added to that it had caught cold ( joking ) . So I convinced my friend with a Live USB to use LMDE. First thing I noticed was I was unable to boot from USB . I had to disable UEFI boot and boot via legacy mode by hanging the bios setttings. Oh yeah the secure boot was not turned on by dell , so I left it alone. Next I was unable to access the Windows partitions. My friend needed the data. Though there are better ways to do things, I just booted to windows and copied all the useful files to external hard disk. To install I found that the hard disk was formatted in GPT https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GUID_Partition_Table I just used "gdisk" https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/gdisk which is available in the repo's to just convert the whole thing into MBR. There were two hard disks one 500 GB and one 32 GB SSD. I gave SSD for / and swap while the /home was for 500 GB hard disk. Note : conversion leads to complete loss of data. Anyways my friend hardly cared about windows so its gone and gives me a good feeling to install single boot :) @sreepriya: Just buy some windows laptop and apply for a microsoft refund as you have not accepted the EULA license, though its not as simple as said , have a look at what Praveen has done http://www.j4v4m4n.in/2014/06/24/microsoft-tax-refund/ ^ Hope the others in LUG and some legal advisor’s help for getting the refund. Regards, Pavithran http://look-pavi.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
