Back in October I bought myself a new shiny SSD to finally make the first step of leaving behind Windows.
After enquiring about which Distro to use, I settled on Fedora after being fed up with using Ubuntu in the past and feeling not close to technically skilled enough to use Arch.
The original plan was to have the SSD hold multiple Linux OS as well as a common storage that can be accessed from Windows as well as these distros.
Since I wanted to be able to dual boot multiple OS (Fedora & Tails) I choose Ventoy … Well chose is a strong word. It’s the only software for dual booting that still seems to be maintained.
While reading up on Ventoy I hit my fist snag. Ventoy does not support persistence in Tails. “Okay whatever I can deal with that later as long as I am able to store some file on common folder I’m fine” However dear reader who knows about partitioning, you will know that we are running out of space on the partition table with Ventoy, Tails and Fedora each taking up space. Once again I thought “okay whatever, I can figure that out later” and moved on to Fedora.
Now, running Fedora without persistence through Ventoy is no issue, but as soon you want persistence it gets tricky. See, Fedora cannot just with run persistence off Ventoy. It needs a boot option edited. How this is accomplished? No one even in the Ventoy Forum could tell me. and I felt waaay in over my head when I started reading up on Grub and how to edit the Bootloader files I find somewhere while digging through the ISO with 7zip. So I started reading up what this “selinux” option even is and found out that, I should probably not disable it. to begin with.
“Oookay” I thought slightly desperate, “I guess Ventoy is off the table” Luckily, a few weeks later, I found out about Whonix. Thus, a new play formed in my head: Ditch Ventoy and Tails, part the SSD to make it usable as a normal file storage and keep the other partition with persistent Fedora with Whonix. “Okay, that seems already waaay easier. I installed Ubuntu before from a VM to USB Sticks for school, I can do the same with Fedora. I’m basically already on the finishing straight”
Well no. Turns out, running a VM comes with its own snags. Like how VMware really is only working great if you buy a licence or the fact that Virtualbx automatically set’s the USB Standard of each VM to USB 2.0 meaning you will need to reboot the live OS to make the SSD running under 3.0 visible for installation. There goes another 20 minutes down the drain.
After fiddling around with the partition manager in Fedora and reading up on the documentation surrounding this issue (and finding out that it is more than 15(!) Version behind the current setup (it was a nice read tho)) another slap happened, to my already failing believe that this project would work out.
Partitioning the SSD with a home, boot, swap and EFI System Partition, can leave enough space on the Disk but no extra space on the partition table.
“Well, guess I have to mount a LVM Partiton somewhere” I thought and moved on in the hope to at least get Fedora finally running on the SSD.
But alas, my BIOS just decided to throw the most generic error ever.
Upon searching the web I found about this bug which apparently has been open since Fedora 37. So on the chance of me having said issue because of this bug, I got Fedora 36 and repeated the steps of creating a VM (don’t forget about that USB2 issue, or you will lose 20 minutes again) and installing it on the SSD. Presumably because I have an unmaintained version of Fedora which is 3 version behind the current one, installing Fedora on the SSD took more than an hour. (opposed to the 30 minutes it took me with 38.)
And after all that hassle? Still nothing. I still get that Bios Error and I still can’t run Fedora, and I have to say I’m sick and tired of it. I’m not a complete idiot (in most ways of life) but I cannot for the love of me figure out how I will ever get this to work. Or how the average user (who, let’s assume for the sake of my argument, is also not a complete idiot) is supposed to make this work. The hoops I jumped through, the hours of time wasted waiting for a status bar to update, the time spent googling and reading up on seemingly obscure issues, no average user wants to do this. It’s utopian to assume “oh users will just switch if Microsoft just does this or that stupid thing”. Whatever will happen, these users will not come in troves to Linux. This experience, which I can only describe as “running blind through a mirror maze” is masochistic. And I can’t do it any more. Maybe six months down the road, when brain damage finally has me forgotten the headache this journey has caused, I will pick this project up again. For now, I just really needed to write this rant, or I fear this day spent troubleshooting was for nothing.
Edit: Thank you to everybody for reading through my, I gotta say now, quite ignorant, post. Also thank you to most posters. Most comments were quite helpful and kind.
A few things that I might not have explained the best way.
The goal of the project was threefold:
•Have a removable drive with Linux on to slowly ease myself into this new OS while still having Windows as a fallback on the laptop
•Have it also work as a normal storage drive in the windows environment. (preferably without seeing any Linux folders in Window explorer)
•Have some kind of secure privacy option available to browse Anna’s archive for ebooks.
TL;DR: Install Fedora from a liveUSB, as recommended in all the official documents and guides. If you have a secure boot issue, it’s likely because you installed from a VM. VMs run in BIOS mode by default, so the Fedora installer would install to your SSD without UEFI secure boot compatibility.
It seems like you may be overcomplicating things here. Why install to your SSD from a VM? Why not just make a liveUSB, boot into that, and then install to the SSD? That’s the recommended install method, and is far less error prone. The UEFI error you linked is resolved in Fedora 40 (which releases on the 23rd), but I highly doubt that was your issue, it seems like quite the long shot. Additionally, you do not need a swap partition (swapfiles have been standard for a long time), and honestly I’d just recommend you stick to the default partitioning scheme if you aren’t already comfortable in Linux. Less room for error that way.
If you believe secure boot to be an issue (like you seem to based on the issue you linked), then you should know that VMs all run in BIOS mode by default, not UEFI, so installing from a VM will not install with UEFI secure boot compatibility (hence why you should use the recommended method of booting from a liveUSB). This is why I don’t believe the issue you linked is related, as if secure boot were the problem, than the issue is the fact that you’re installing from a VM, since the VM will only know that it was booted in BIOS mode and do a BIOS mode install with no UEFI secure boot compatibility.
Tails is meant to boot from a USB drive, it is not meant to be installed on your system, so I’m not sure why you wanted to partition for it. I’m not even sure that it has an installer, because all the official documents and guides only talk about using a liveUSB (how it’s intended to be used).
I’m a bit confused why you chose to go this route to installing Fedora, as I’ve never seen a guide or any official documentation recommend a setup like this. Any guide you find online should tell you to use a liveUSB for installation, and that’s by far the easiest way. So I don’t quite understand the complaint about how “difficult” Linux is to install for the average user when you aren’t following any official way to install it. The “hoops” you jumped through all seem to be self-imposed. If you are actually experiencing a hardware-related issue, then the next step would be to try a different distro, but you need to try an official installation method before that, because that’s most likely your issue. Again, if secure boot is the issue, then you will experience the same thing from any other distro if you try to install it from a VM. That simply won’t work.
Fedora’s official documentation has you go to this page to download the Fedora Media Writer for Windows (an alternative to Rufus/Ventoy that will automatically download the Fedora ISO for you). You run that .exe in Windows with a USB flash drive plugged in, and it’s self-explanatory. Then you boot into the liveUSB you created (you may have to go into your BIOS and enable USB booting), and follow the installer steps. I suggest you wait until Fedora 40 releases on Tuesday, as it’s less than a week away. If by some long shot that issue you linked was in any way related, it is fixed in Fedora 40. No need to rush things. Just follow the official installation instructions, don’t go off on your own, and see if it works. If it doesn’t, you have a hardware issue and you can try to install something like Debian to see if it has the same hardware issues.
I’ll wait till Tuesday. Thank you for the heads up! The reason I choose to use a VM over a live USB is because I just don’t have another 16GB USB lying around that works for Linux. I honestly didn’t know that the ISO in the VM would behave so differently. Is that simply a limitation of the Distro or is this intentional?
It’s a limitation of the VM, unless you take extra special steps to configure it to use UEFI.
I am tempted to say I would try to configure that but looking at the (rightful) backlash I got so far I will stay away from that for now.
If secure boot is the only issue with installing from a VM, then there’s a good chance you could get it to work. The problem is that this is a very untested method, and there’s a very reasonable probability that there could be more issues than just that. The only problem I personally know about is UEFI secure boot mode, but I only have a small amount of experience with VMs, so you’d be doing that at your own risk.
You could use a burnable DVD (not a CD, it’s too small) if you have that option. Also, you only need a 2GB flash drive, just in case you were excluding something because you thought it was too small. But buying a small capacity flash drive is pretty cheap nowadays, you don’t need anything fancy. I’m seeing 128GB flash drives for $13 and 64GB for $8 on Amazon. You can probably get one for cheaper at a grocery store or electronics store. They’re really handy to have laying around. The liveUSB is definitely the easiest method, and it’s pretty much the only tested method, so if it’s an option for you, that’s what I’d recommend.