RIP Lian Li....

[Dalebvr]

It's sad when a solid, reliable partner just can't cut it anymore. Been rebuilding the office after putting down laminate on the upstairs floor (got one of the standing desks to replace the 30 year old pasteboard one, Yay!), and my rebuilt main system, -just- after I finished rebuilding it (after building the 1920 threadripper gaming beast), has died. Southbridge has gone pfft, as the onboard SATA connections are all so dead the bios can't find them. Hardware fails. But the bad part is that the 16 year old Lian Li full tower aluminum case isn't usable anymore. The replacement hardware is a 1920 threadripper on an Aorus 399X Pro mobo. The cooler is a Noctua 140mm air cooler (which will get a second fan on it in a push pull arrangement). My trooper case only has mounts for 80mm fans, and would require cutting a lot of supports to even get close to the airflow of a modern case, so my trooper is going over the garage in hopes that someone may need it. I've done 5 separate builds in that case, from the Athlon II 700 (yes, the SEGA cartridge one) to the last generation Phenom Black. But the 'ripper runs too hot for an old ATX enclosure.

The new case is a Corsair Obsidian 750D full tower. EATX down to mini ITX board support, even more storage options that the trooper (3 external full bays, 6 horizontal slide HDD mounts, and 4 on side SSD mounts. That's in addition to the 3 M.2 SSD mounts on the Aorus mobo, hee hee hee). Initial video will be a GeForce 1060; still trying to decide if I just use the mobo codec or add the SB EAX I currently have in the old tower.

The upgrade forces me off Win 7 and onto 10 to keep using a lot of my animation and AV software. However, I would like to dual boot with Linux and start learning that OS. Any suggestions on the build, and things to watch out for when trying to set up a dual boot with the Win beast?

[Baler]

You had me scared for a moment that Lian Li was going out of business. I love their cheap aluminum full size towers and have been using them on all my home pc builds for years.

If you're brand new to linux may I recommend avoiding dual boot and going with a portable boot drive ala usb thumb drive with a linux boot on it. This way you're not having to fuss with dual boot and can in some sense plug and play linux when you desire.

Also if you have privacy concerns look into disabling windows 10 tracking as well as using a firewall to block microsoft.

[jefetienne]

I've been using Linux for about two years now, and I finally made the switch to using it as my main OS about a month ago now for general use and gaming.

Right now I have a dual boot setup with two SSDs, one with Linux and one with Windows. I once had a dual-boot on a single drive, which worked pretty well, except sometimes Linux would repeatedly crash on startup for some reason, but it may or may not have been just a bad install.. The advice that I've gotten is that Windows 10 can be pretty interfering with booting, so it's best to keep them as separate drives entirely.

When installing, you need to make sure that Secure Boot is disabled in your UEFI/BIOS, and also Fast Startup on Windows 10. I think you even need to disable hibernation as well if you're doing both OSes on a single drive. Also when dual-booting, you might need to install GRUB as well which helps you switch between Linux and Windows if your UEFI/BIOS doesn't provide a way to do so.

When it comes to what OSes are out there, I've been using Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon. It works really well out of the box. I've also heard that Manjaro is even easier to work with since you can install plenty of gaming software libraries like Steam and WINE without even using a terminal (if you're uncomfortable with that). I've never used it, though.

r/linux_gaming has a really good post on setting up a gaming computer on Linux.

[Dalebvr]

You had me scared for a moment that Lian Li was going out of business. I love their cheap aluminum full size towers and have been using them on all my home pc builds for years.

If you're brand new to linux may I recommend avoiding dual boot and going with a portable boot drive ala usb thumb drive with a linux boot on it. This way you're not having to fuss with dual boot and can in some sense plug and play linux when you desire.

Also if you have privacy concerns look into disabling windows 10 tracking as well as using a firewall to block microsoft.

Sorry about that. I've used the LL for everything since I graduated from 486 and steel plain jane cases. Unfortunately, none of the current LL towers have the storage capability I need; most are designed for RGB fashion shows, and I already have one of those in the game beast.

The thumb drive install may be an aption; I'll have to look into that more.

[Dalebvr]

I've been using Linux for about two years now, and I finally made the switch to using it as my main OS about a month ago now for general use and gaming.

Right now I have a dual boot setup with two SSDs, one with Linux and one with Windows. I once had a dual-boot on a single drive, which worked pretty well, except sometimes Linux would repeatedly crash on startup for some reason, but it may or may not have been just a bad install.. The advice that I've gotten is that Windows 10 can be pretty interfering with booting, so it's best to keep them as separate drives entirely.

When installing, you need to make sure that Secure Boot is disabled in your UEFI/BIOS, and also Fast Startup on Windows 10. I think you even need to disable hibernation as well if you're doing both OSes on a single drive. Also when dual-booting, you might need to install GRUB as well which helps you switch between Linux and Windows if your UEFI/BIOS doesn't provide a way to do so.

When it comes to what OSes are out there, I've been using Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon. It works really well out of the box. I've also heard that Manjaro is even easier to work with since you can install plenty of gaming software libraries like Steam and WINE without even using a terminal (if you're uncomfortable with that). I've never used it, though.

r/linux_gaming has a really good post on setting up a gaming computer on Linux.

I'll check all that out. It's been a few decades, but I cut my baby teeth on the DOS command line, so it doesn't scare me. I would definitely use dual SSD's in any case; the one time I tried dual booting between win and DOS via a boot selector was a real pain the asterick.

Right now I'm working on getting as many of my AV programs over to freeware as I can. SonicFire Pro 6 is still Win based, but Audacity and Hitfilm and Natron have Linux native versions. Since most of the Adobe stuff I have are coasters now, a pox on them. About the only program I might deign to 'rent to use' is Vue; there really isn't a replacement for that in the pipeline.

[Dalebvr]

.
If you're brand new to linux may I recommend avoiding dual boot and going with a portable boot drive ala usb thumb drive with a linux boot on it. This way you're not having to fuss with dual boot and can in some sense plug and play linux when you desire.

Well, I've tried to go the usb route, but something isn't happy with the process I used. I created a boot usb with Rufus, and downloaded Mint 19.3 'Tricia' with Cinnamon. The iso checked out and it does come up on the new system both the mint specific menu and GRUB, but the process fails at (initramfs). It gets much further in the boot process using compatibility mode. This is the end output:

[ 12.190554] Overlayfs: unrecognized mount option 'lowerdir' or missing value

BusyBox v1.27.2 (Ubuntu1:1.27.2-2 ubuntu 3.2) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands

(initramfs) mount: mounting /cow on /root failed: Invalid argument overlay mount failed

Being an utter newb to Linux, any ideas what isn't configured correctly?

[Baler]

The usb boot drive you created with rufus did you select persistence? Perhaps try without selecting persistence to see if it boots.

[Dalebvr]

Yes I did. I'll try that and see what happens.

This is fun! Reminds me of DOS and fighting with the config file....