Last July I bought an HP laptop from Canada Computers. They were a good value (Ryzen 7, 16 GB, 1TB SSD for $949 pre tax on 14"). I know two other people got similar machines -- my research suggests about $150+ less than anything close in specs.
Then the machine had Win10, and I sorted out dual boot with Secure Boot disabled. Last week I picked up another, supposedly the same, but now with Win11. Sigh. Now Secure Boot is a bit more problematic, but I went through both imaging and recorvery disk setup, then shrinking Windows and Linux Mint install, and by and large all works OK. A bcdedit in Windows was needed to avoid losing the Linux boot, but I'd learned that last July. On bootup, I do get an error message about the shim file, but both Win11 and Linux Mint boot OK, so I've not dug into things. Now I've reached the point of installing Virtualbox so I can run other OS images (including possibly a Win10 VM to avoid dual boot). When I tried installing VBox, I got a message that I needed to provide an MOK password. Not being sure of things, I aborted at that point. However, subsequent reading suggests this is OK. Before I proceed, I'm wondering if anyone on the list has gone through an install of Virtualbox under similar conditions. If so, I'd appreciate a chance to exchange ideas. This issue is likely to become more common, and it may be an obstacle to "general" users who might like to install Linux, but want to keep Windows around in a "legal" form. "Legal" in quotes, meaning acceptable to Microsoft. What I've currently found in the way of documentation is often very technical, and also seems to be very variable with particular hardware, BIOS, distro etc. It would be good to get some key documentation recorded (on Linux-Ottawa for example), and I'll be happy to try to do that, but it is somewhat outside my expertise and comfort zone. Responses welcome. John Nash To unsubscribe send a blank message to [email protected] To get help send a blank message to [email protected] To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org
