I decided to dual boot Trisquel on my windows 10 desktop but it proved quite
the dramatic adventure
So I freed some space from windows, and rebooted into a Trisquel live USB.
When I started the installer from the live environment,it did not recognise
Windows 10 at all,and made no offer to install next to it. (Usually the first
offer)
So I stopped the installer,went back into windows and made a Fedora live USB
instead,to reproduce the issue.
Fedora detected the free space and installed without issue next to Windows.
It made a Windows recovery option in grub,which booted windows when selected.
This was the first fail on Trisquel's part.
I rebooted again into the Trisquel live USB and started the installer again.
This time,it did recognise Fedora 23 (TwentyThree) and made the usual offers
(Next to,Wipe).I wiped Fedora and Installed Trisquel. Everything went
smoothly. I restarted the PC. To my surprise Windows was not listed at all in
Grub. I was shocked, since I was pretty sure I only wiped Fedora.
This was the second fail by Trisquel
I booted into Trisquel (the only option) and it booted fine. Inside Trisquel,
I could see my Windows partitions in the File Manager but they weren't
mounted. So it hadn't wiped windows after all. I went into terminal and ran
the commands
sudo os-prober
sudo update-grub2
Which detected windows and added the option to Grub. All is well I thought.
So I rebooted into grub and selected Windows recovery. Lo and behold Grub
asked for a username.I key in my username and password.Nothing happens,and it
goes back to the OS list on grub. I recall how it asked nothing of the sort
on Fedora,and boot back into Trisquel again.
This is the third fail by Trisquel.
After some strong searching on the internets I come across someone with a
similar issue,from this forum,and his solution. It seems Trisquel sets a
password on anything that isn't Trisquel (He had Debian and Windows) and the
username and password aren't the login ones (why? I do not know). The fix is
commenting out the username and password in
/etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD (needs root,don't forget to also update-grub2)
So one last time I reboot and select windows recovery in Grub.FINALLY, a
working dual boot!
I feel this was unnecessarily hard and complex just to achieve a simple dual
boot.
1.Trisquel 7 doesn't detect windows 10 at all
2.Trisquel doesn't list Windows in grub even if you do get them next to each
other
3.Trisquel puts a username and password (that aren't readily apparent to the
installer) on the Windows option if you do get grub to list it.
If someone wants to dual boot just let them. For a distro that is supposed to
be giving users freedom this whole debacle feels highly restrictive.Similar
functionality to Fedora would be ideal here (detect free space,add windows to
grub,no passwords) in Trisquel 8.
