PMSL - no, life's just too short to be fighting all this stuff. There's nothing I want to do on a computer that's worth the effort. Switch it on, do what I want, then switch it off. Then I have more time for cycling or fighting my race car

Which is why I like linux...

So why bother with W8 at all (or any Windows OS)?

Because that's what the laptop comes with.

I do have a couple of useful applications which need Windows to run, but I think that once I've got this system sorted I'll probably just wash it off and run Windows in a virtual machine. Though that will require me to buy a further copy of Windows, which rather goes against the grain.

I'm with MRS on this. As an ex IT techy, there was nothing I enjoyed more than hours of tinkering. But gradually over time I found it more and more frustrating leading to extended bouts of computer rage, finally I woke up and realised that the computer is just a tool to do stuff with, and the time for doing stuff was eaten up by trying to make the damn thing work. So i went from a confirmed PC, anti Apple person to an instant convert. I bought an iMac roughly a year ago, I switched it on, connected to my wireless network and that was it. Since then I have never had to tinker once, can't honestly remember the last time I went near to any settings!

As Neil says, each to their own, but when I think of the hours, days, weeks and probably months of my life I have wasted trying to make various MS products work properly.....

It's a bit like a car, I just want to drive the bloody thing without having to change the parameters on some obscure sensor just because I chose to wear red socks that day!

Yup, MrB, you're coming from exactly the same place as me. I could save the "premium" Apple products cost me doing other jobs I pay for just with the time I've got back.

I fear we're fiercely agreeing with each other, gentlemen.

My argument for Linux has *always* been that it does what I need better than the alternatives. That I like the open source software philosophy is a benefit, as is the general (though I appreciate not complete) lack of virus attacks.

The fact that I have had serious issues - down purely to new hardware - is no reason to change my views.

I can fully understand such a desire but feel I must question why such logic deserted you when buying a car. Almost everyone knows that all Italian cars would fail to offer such a simple function to almost all of their owners.

Did you get sorted in the end Neil. Surely it will be some super fast Linux machine? Are new Linux install#s that demanding?

It will be a very quick machine, which is what I'm after as I do a lot of optical character recognition and if I can get that down from a minute or so per page I'd very much like to...

It's not yet fully resolved. I've found a distribution - Fedora 18 Beta - which at least recognises the video system (with a 3.6 kernel) and runs, and stuck cinnamon on it, but there are still issues (as you'd expect with a beta). At present it's doing software compositing for the screen graphics - which isn't too bad as the first thing I do is turn off all the eye candy - but I haven't resolved that yet.

I have been given a couple of pointers as to internal settings which I hope to try today.

It's not that the installation is demanding - it's just that few recognise the video system and don't even have a visible text output, so I can't use them once they're on. I can't even SSH from a remote machine since I don't know the IP (though I could find out from the router DHCP log).

Might be worth giving Sabayon a bash (no pun intended) its gentoo based but has support for UEFI secureboot out of the box, also has the usual array of desktop managers to choose from.
Having said that it sounds as if you are getting there with Fedora 18 beta, which has a newer version of Shim than Ubuntu 12.10 apparently.

As for window 8............

We seem to get in to this argument alot, for what its worth I do not have to "fiddle" with my OS, I built a system and have continued to use it with out issue since install.
I worked out that the PC case for this system is over 10 years old yesterday!

What argument is that ?

I think Sam is talking about people going on about OS & machine choices. There is clear difference of opinion on this but it is far from an argument, it's all just a debate and a bit of a giggle. Each users choice is based upon many factors such as Tweak ability, costs and ease of use. What suits one person will probably not be what another wants, or can perhaps afford, so such discussions are futile. We still have them though.

Indeed, fair enough, horses for courses and all that !
I've always been a "pop the bonnet, look under the hood" kinda person so Linux is more than just an OS, it's one of my hobbies.
I'm not blinkered however, I'll use whatever OS I need to get the job done, after I've made damn sure it ain't going run under Linux first though !

That's why the Italian one is sat in the garage and the German one is the one on the drive that gets used

Ditto!!!

Ah, but for me, the Italian one doesn't get used not because it's likely to break, or unlikely to start, but simply because I live too far from work... a matter of cost. The coupe was used daily for fifteen years!

Currently, I'm building a gentoo image, having found a way to get it started. This has been described as 'first, find an oil well, an iron mine, and a rubber tree. From these, build a car...'

In fairness don't you have another Italian in its place for the daily runner? No German machinery is there?

On the windows 8 note. One feature I notice which I liked a lot is windows 8 can open images files as they are without being burned off etc. (just tested an iso file) so can actually check the files inside the image without waste time and a cd.

No need for demontools and mount the disc

ISO is like a zip file, you can uncompress it as such. No doubt another feature Microsoft has "invented"

They will say they would of course.Just no need to bother with a third party bit of software which should of course been in earlier versions of windows.

Yep, I do commute in another fiat!

Compiling the kernel for the second time, having built it once while forgetting to include the network controller module!

I may have to do it again to include the wireless network, but I can live with that. And I have it working on the frame buffer, too... watch this space. It's a bloody quick compile; I did this once and it took (literally) three weeks...

Interesting thread - so you decided to keep W8 and install gentoo alongside? If so, how was the hard drive partitioned from factory? Only ask because if the W8 partition needed to be resized to allow space for gentoo could that maybe cause issues?

A lot of the PC's I have used have either never come with an OS or have Windows on them so I just run a linux live disc, shred the drive (if necessary), repartition it to have some allocated to Windows, swap and the majority for mint. install windows and then linux so I can have the grub menu at boot. I use virtualbox a fair bit but it's a necessity to have the option of windows at startup too as the missus uses it a fair bit and I have done so for games and other bits of software.

good luck with the install. I'm currently working on a bash script in work to decomplile android apks and then I need to get involved with the source code. Only just starting to learn java so this isn't going to be pleasant journey

This laptop has two drives; windows is untouched on one and linux is on the other.

At the moment I seem to have painted myself into something of a corner; my previously usable-but-with-no-network-modules kernel won't talk to me, I think because the locale has changed (US->GB) since setting the passwords, and the new improved kernel which *should* have the network active won't start because it doesn't believe the root partition is where I tell it it is!

It doesn't help that the definitions are based on sdb as the second (linux) drive from the bios, but (hd0,0) from grub...

Once the linux is working nicely, then the windows is coming off, I think. I might stick w7 on for the rare occasions I need it.

I tried gentoo once and can appreciate the difficulty. Without a friend who knew it all I would have got nowhere. These days I run Ubuntu Studio and Mint. I did convert wifey's Vista laptop to a VM which re-activated using the same key - but was the same cpu/machine just a different disk/SSD.

Reubs
I also like the fact you can now also mount an iso within the OS so no need for deamon tools etc...

You have always been able to see inside isos with the later versions of win zip although I always preferred .7zip

Right, sorted... I now have the excellent Mint 14.1 on this laptop up and running... it's not dual booting to W8 (I need to play with rEFInd, I think) but as I have few plans to use W8 this isn't an issue.

It turns out that for some odd reason, the video driver wakes up with the backlight on minimum - aka 'off'. This is a state pretty much indistinguishable from 'it's buggered'...

Turn up the backlight and everything's fine. The installation took all of ten minutes after discovering that tiny fact!

Well, that gave the local network a bit of a hammering: half a terabyte of data transferred across a 100Mb/s line, to get the stuff off my old computer and onto the new... shiny shiny!

Well done on sorting it all. How did you transfer the data? Doing the same with mine later on using scp and a crossover cable.

Two computers, wired to a 100MHz switch. Share with samba (windows SMB protocol) and just copy from the share - that way I could pick and choose and not just replicate the whole data structure.

7 hours at 10MB/s...