Probook ALL CHANGE!

Quick update on what I've done since my last post:

I put Opensuse / and /home on two of the LVs I'd set aside. That was a big iso. 4.3G, so I had to use a DVD. It installed fine, was all very swish. Gnome felt very different from what I'm used to and didn't seem massively user friendly for her to use, so I tried KDE. Lots of bells and whistles there, but also not what I was looking for.

Looked at Elementary OS again and still found it very attractive. Found a method by which (in theory) I should have been able to install to the remaining LVs on my hdd: log into a live session and install lvm2:

sudo apt-get install lvm2 - this gave me some problems, weirdly, not finding it in the repos and requiring me to try a few times. I went through this process of trying to install to LVs a few times - on some it worked fine. Odd.

Then vgchange -a y to "activate" the entries in the volume group and make them available to the kernel. Running the installer now lets you see the LVs when editing the partitioning on the disc. I reckon I did install EOS on the os2-root and os3-home volumes - the problem seemed to be the bootloader. It's cause a fatal error if I tried to overwrite the Opensuse boot sector on sda1, and failed to install when I pointed it at the hdd as a whole. Ended up with unbootable system.

os-prober didn't help (only detected #!, so maybe EOS didn't install?) nor did the mkconfig [blah, blah, arguments] variation. I couldn't install grub from a live session.

So I got pissed off and just gave over the whole pc to an EOS install. I wanted to try to save #! but there was nothing on there I don't have on the ASUS, and I can reproduce the setup pretty quick I reckon. Bits of it were really annoying me anyway - like power button wasn't recognised, and function keys like brightness claimed to be working while clearly they weren't.

So Elementary is in place, and I must say I'm pretty pleased so far. Feels like I might have found the right OS for this laptop. Debian base means I can apt-get install to my heart's content and the whole thing feels light, spacious and intuitive.

I might need to set up some keyboard shortcuts to manage apps and windows on my account, and I have to install some stuff (skype, dropbox, steam, soulseek, libreoffice packages etc). But I created a new user without issue (unlike on mint), the fn keys work out the box (unlike #! or opensuse) and interfaces all seem nice and straightforward - no need to edit config files as a mater of course.

FTP to the piNAS is nice and simple (need to find a way to save that connection), and the music app looks good. Very promising, all in all.

The HP 4340s wifi had problems across all these OSs. On #! and suse I updated the kernel and that was fine. Elementary I just had to do an update from the ubuntu repos (I think it was sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-raring) and reboot.