Posted on 01/17/2019 8:28:14 AM PST by ShadowAce
For those contemplating upgrading from Linux Mint 18.3 and earlier to 19. There is a significant change to how Mint runs in ver 19. Further, not all video drivers are supported as of yet.
As always, take a snapshot / backup before the upgrade so you can revert if needed.
Also, check to see if 19 supports your driver before the upgrade attempt.
I have an embedded video card (AMD R7) that was not supported at the time of the attempt to upgrade. Learned the hard way.
I read the posted info and seemed to have missed the info on setting up #2 “Linux on top of Windows”. I’ve tried dual boot set ups and partitioning is old hat. But the #2 option...sounds interesting.
bkmk
It is truly a wonderful OS because of its broad support for older hardware. Plus, it is more secure than Windows, etc. I am running Ubuntu on three of my computers. One of them is a 12 year old laptop.
Oh, and they do offer a 32bit version for the really old hardware. You just have to look for it.
Thx for posting this.
Question: I have a laptop with a bad HD. It’s 5 or 6 years old. Would Linux run well on it?
That’s why I still recommend the 18.3 and am letting the dust settle on 19 and 19.1 for awhile.
And very good suggestion about making a backup right away. And also go and set up “Timeshift” right away so that it starts to take mirrors at regular intervals as you prefer. Time shift works just like the “restore” feature in windows.
With a bad HD? If you boot to a LiveCD, it should run just fine, though a little slow (optical drives are much slower than hard drives).
If the hard drive actually works it will. But not having a working drive makes it a brick and nothing can be done with it. New drive maybe?
I tried Linux again a few weeks ago. It’s worse than ever.
If you’re a fan boy, and willing to make sure everything you buy is compatible, then go for it. Otherwise, it’s a huge waste of time.
Linux isn’t even worth it for rescue disk anymore.
I went an even easier route. I had the guru at the computer repair shop install Mint for me.
This article seems to deal with 10 year old technology. The way to run Linux “over” Windows is to use free software like VirtualBox and install virtual machines. If you build CopyOnWrite image files, then it doesn’t even take a lot of disk space.
I just set up a 10 virtual machine test cluster on a monster lab machine with 32 processors. I used Fedora 29 as my host machine and KVM for the virtual software.
But if you are starting with a Windows machine and you have some disk space to spare, then VirtualBox is probably the way to go.
I was thinking that, also. How should I format the new HD?
you can get Hard Drives really cheap these days- and they are easy to install- I’d pick up a good used one, and install linux on it or even dual boot- if you are thinking of wiping out windows on the old Hd anyways- but yes, it should run fine on your computer- but try a live CD first to see-
Bkmk.
I have a couple of machines, one with the Nvidia 1080 card. That upgrade went smoothly.
With the version of linux I highly recommend, it does it all for you automatically as part of the great install package. It will ask you if you want to format it before it installs the package and do it for you. Are you sure the drive is even bad? It could be something else.
There are many things that could give this false impression. Just trying to install linux will tell you. It will check everything out as part of the install and if it is truly bad it will tell you. If not... You will have a working linux machine! :)
I’d just give it a shot and see what it does! Make the Linux USB stick on a working computer and then set your bios on the target Computer to boot from the USB stick which it might do bad drive or not. Then see what it does with the install. Worst case scenario you will already have your linux stick made up already for when you do get the drive working. :)
Slick as snot! I really like the auto-install and how easy it works. Did you encrypt it? I haven’t done this yet because I have been installing it over windows and was worried about whether it would still go read and access the windows folders like it does when it is unencrypted.
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