Advice for a Newbie please?

Hi all,

have an Acer E1-571 with 8Gb memory and a 1Tb SDD which originally had Win 10. As I have so much space, I was seduced into installing Mageia 7 alongside Win 10, which went really well, even down to Mageia installing rEFInd to handle the booting (a brilliant idea that I think all distro's should adopt ). However, I am now being seduced by Zorin OS and would love to try that.

So the question is, what would be the best route to follow when installing? Should I delete the Mageia partition and give the space to Win 10 so that I can select the "Install Zorin alongside Win 10"? Or should I simply wipe out Mageia and install Zorin OS into the free space it leaves? Or is it even possible to install Zorin along side the existing Win 10/Mageia? All advice/suggestions gratefully received.

Ideally I would like to keep hold of rEFInd as a boot manger as it is so simple.

Kind Regards,

As you have got Mageia working well (I never could get it to work satisfactorily - plus for me there was always something 'missing' - a bit like Mint but different feeling!). As you have quite a bit of space, why not triple boot? So long as:

1. You created a separate /home partition from root ('/') and did not do an auto install.
2. You formatted your Mageia file systems to Ext2 (Ext3 and Ext4 are journaling file systems constantly writing to your drive - thereby shortening the life of the drive.
3. Did you setup TRIM? Windows does this automatically - you have to set it up manually in Linux:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... ux-servers

As you can't recover data so readily with an SSD drive due to how they work I would advise in investing in a 2 Tb external drive - which you could also set up as a /home drive - but partition first.

I must admit to having the same feeling of "not quite right" about Mageia, hence my wondering eye.

Unfortunately I did an auto-install and did not choose how to format the file systems so they may well be Ext3 or Ext4 so I gues I'm ditching Mageia. Can I just wipe the partition and install Zorin OS to the free space? How do I select that in the install routine?

Also, as Zorin OS is Ubuntu based does that mean it used systemd and therefore I should follow those instruction to set up TRIM?

essenby wrote:I must admit to having the same feeling of "not quite right" about Mageia, hence my wondering eye.

Unfortunately I did an auto-install and did not choose how to format the file systems so they may well be Ext3 or Ext4 so I gues I'm ditching Mageia. Can I just wipe the partition and install Zorin OS to the free space? How do I select that in the install routine?

Also, as Zorin OS is Ubuntu based does that mean it used systemd and therefore I should follow those instruction to set up TRIM?

That is beyond me: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm ... trim_on_a/

It's one reason why I prefer to stick with spinning disks instead of static ones.

The best method to dual boot is Matthew Moore method:

https://youtu.be/xlTgaWs9BD0

Nearly forgot - as you have an SSD no need for swap.

My version of Matthew Moore's method: https://vimeo.com/110085401

Unfortunately my Win 10 bootloader is UEFI and I'm not sure it can be persuaded to boot an unsigned Non-Microshaft operating system. There may be commercial utilities out there that might do it but I'd rather not be tied to a commercial offering that may require regular updates and associated costs. rEFInd does it perfectly
(https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/)

essenby wrote:Unfortunately my Win 10 bootloader is UEFI and I'm not sure it can be persuaded to boot an unsigned Non-Microshaft operating system.

It can, each machine I am running Zorin on is UEFI. On each, I installed Zorin by the basic installation procedures.

Interesting. I thought the EFI partition and bootloader made the MBR ineffective.

Forgive my curiosity and lack of knowledge but by "basic installation" procedure do you mean Grub being installed to the MBR? If so, does Grub call EFI or vice versa? If I've misunderstood (highly likely) could you give me some pointers please on how best to proceed?

essenby wrote:Interesting. I thought the EFI partition and bootloader made the MBR ineffective.

If you were to install Zorin on the MBR with UEFI, you would very likely have troubles, yes. So please Do Not Install Zorin on the MBR.
Swarfendors tutorial that he posted above or the link here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI# ... stallation
Can both be very helpful in installing Zorin 15 Alongside Windows and to do so with UEFI. You are correct: Do Not Install Zorin on the MBR. You must create a partition for Zorin, instead.