I always was a windows child, since apple was never an option for my dad an when I became a gamer in my late childhood Linux wasn't an option as well. But today, I see a lot of problems with Windows as well as Mac OS and the only thing I didn't tried so far was Linux.
I already have some experience with Linux distros as a subsystem on my Windowslaptop and with Raspbian but I never tried a standalone on. Mostly, because I didn't knew what machine to use for it.
And then, I saw a post from a blogger on instagram, having a lot of old Thinkpads with a lot of different distros.
I thought about my old ASUS laptop that I gave up on because it nearly dies under windows and has a broken backlight, so it flickers without a connection to the power supply system. Also, I miss the screws for the backplate. It might be useless for normal on the go work, but it is perfect as the testmachine I'm searching for.
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| The five years old ASUS F555L |
So I decided to use it as a testmachine. I hooked up with the blogger from instagram and she gave me some ideas of nice distros I can try out. Because I had an Ubuntu as the subsystem on my Windows and Raspbian also refers on Ubuntu, I decided to go with the Arch distro Manjaro for my ASUS.
So I went to the official website of Manjaro and tried to download the ISO, the installation file, so I could make a bootstick.
Then I recognized the firefox-downloader telling me the download would "only" need about 600 days, having a downloadspeed of 5 Byte/s. Well, obviously, that shouldn't be like that. I tried the download over a business connection so I should have at least something more than 5 byte. First I blamed the cable connection. But over WIFI I got the same result. After some trying around with using another cable connection or another WIFI, I found out that the firefox browser seemed to have an issue with the download. Because I unfortunately only had the edge browser as an alternative, I used
this one to download the ISO, in under 10 minutes this time.
I wrote the ISO onto an usb drive and inserted it to the laptop. When I entered the UEFI, the only bootoptions I saw was the windows bootmanager and a second option I recognized as empty because it was defined as "[]" (normally the name of the bootoption stands between the brackets). I started to google the problem and found a lot of possible solutions from changing some of the settings to using a different usb drive. After I tried them all, I just tried out anything that was so stupid it could be a try worth again. I selected the "empty" bootoption as the first one in the row and rebooted and suddenly... The system booted from the usb.
Well... the "empty" boot option just didn't had a name, it was all the time there, it was just unnamed. Because I didn't named the usb drive. EPIC facepalm on this one.
Finally, I was able to install Manjaro! Well... not jet, because when I tried to boot the live system after some basic stuff like selecting the keyboard layout, the boot crashed because of missing files... Turned out, by checking on the hash, that the ISO was corrupted so I had to redo all the process from downloading to writing it on a drive and boot it in the laptop again.
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| The prove of Manjaro actualy running in the end |
Luckily, after this row of unfortunate events, everything else went fine and I'm up to play around with Manjaro now. Honestly, there is a lot to explore for me. E.g. how to install software over the GUI, since all linux subsystems I used until now on my windows machine only provide CLI (What I also still prefer for multiple reasons)...
In the end, I couldn't resist giving the kinda shabby (it has scratches and blind spots) lit a new design. Well, it only misses some Manjaro stickers now :D :
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| Redesigned and ready for work |
Maybe, when I tested Manjaro long enough, I'll catch up on it here again.
