Unable to install Solus Plasma 4.6

brent

banger Now that I have Solus installed by creating 2gb boot partition

twice the recommended size means you have a plan🙂

"how do I add boot entries to the menu like Windows Boot manager and Zorin boot files?"

you don't, bios does

BuzzPCSOS If you are not using legacy and therefore no GRUB my guess would be selecting using one of the function keys (F10 or f9 ?) at boot to choose the drive that you load from.

banger ^^^. F12 for me. In my lenovo refurb I was do trick out the bios a little bit (what else is new) but I did get Solus and Endeavour on the same sata SSD with separate Boot entries for each system

BuzzPCSOS I don't like dual booting as it can be more trouble than it is worth

yes, my success took 6 days ..and I didn't take notes I kept going til it worked.

BuzzPCSOS It could save a lot of trial and error here to try something like rescatux which is a good first stop to sort out boot menu issues.

Product noted. Everyone and their mama crows about refind as your real boot manager but that god**med thing only saw grub and didn't detect uefi I thought it was as worthless as usingefibootmgrwho has never preserved a setting for me. Ever. But I digress with loathing and flashbacks, apparently.

craigtoyoracer

banger This should answer your questions. 🙂

https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/quick-start/boot-management

banger

Yes it is clr-boot-manager. I tired using grub as the default loader even trying to add an entry in grub customiser but couldnt work out what to add. OS-prober says unrecognised file system for Solus so wont add it to the menu, windows is fine. I have searched the net for a way to add an entry to CBM but come up empty. Craig that was the first link I looked at. Looks like F12 for now.

Oh and BTW the Solus installer when using replace a partition automatically picks the Windows Boot partition which is 100mb so not enough room. The only other option given is the USB drive. Just some feedback.

WetGeek

banger Oh and BTW the Solus installer when using replace a partition automatically picks the Windows Boot partition which is 100mb so not enough room. The only other option given is the USB drive. Just some feedback.

If you would like an alternative to a complicated dual-boot scheme, please consider a virtual machine. Some VM managers, like VirtualBox (in the repo) work identically on Linux and Windows. So just decide which is the more important to you and create a VM there for the other operating system.

I've written how-to messages in this forum that might help you to give this idea a try, although you could probably figure it out on your own -- it's that easy. And you'll end up with a buttload of advantages over any dual-boot scheme. One of my favorites is not needing to shut down one system in order to access the other. You'll be able to switch from one to the other with just a mouse click.

If you already know about VMs and have decided not to use them, please undertand that I'm not trying to talk you into anything. Just pointing out that there's another approach that allows you to accomplish the same results without all the complications and frustration that you're now becoming aware of.

BuzzPCSOS

banger BTW the Solus installer when using replace a partition automatically picks the Windows Boot partition which is 100mb so not enough room. The only other option given is the USB drive. Just some feedback.

This is not a fault, the idea with replacing a partition is that you replace a system partition (/) which would alow you to install a different Linux OS (or reinstall an existing one) without wiping your documents and some system settings providing you had previously implemented a /home partition. A real time saver if the system gets messed up.
The trick with Windows would be to reduce the system partition by about about 35 to 50Gb using the tools on Solus Live (partition program) and then create an additional ext4 partition from the freed up space to install Solus into. Make that the partition that gets chosen from within the installer.
Please excuse my stating the obvious if you feel at home with disc tweaking, I'm pretty sure that all this exists in the Solus install manual but many just find that too much information and sometimes a short explanation is all that is required to put everything in perspective again.

AlphaElwedritsch

WetGeek Just pointing out that there's another approach that allows you to accomplish the same results without all the complications and frustration that you're now becoming aware of.

wise words of a wise man 😉

banger

I have several VMs under Win 11 including Solus, Zorin and even XP but wanted to use Solus as my daily driver and dont have the space to setup more VMS. I dabbled with Win 11 under a VM but it wouldn't install under boxes. Ah Microsoft.

WetGeek

banger I dabbled with Win 11 under a VM but it wouldn't install under boxes

Windows 11 checks for several entries in its registry that must exist, or must be set to "1" in order for it to run. When that version was new, I found documentation that explained what those entries are, and which allowed me to install and run a Windows 11 VM using VirtualBox. I'm sure the same advice would apply to GNOME-boxes, so it's worth a quick search in the forum, or online.

The alternative I prefer is to simply use Windows 10 while it's still available. It allows me to use an offline account instead of being tied to the Windows 11 ecosystem, which is important to me. When it's no longer supported, I'll need to decide what to do next. Although I was a Windows enterprise software developer for decades before I retired, I now have little need for that operating system, so I've only used the VM to run the odd program that doesn't have a Linux version. And I haven't really needed it for a very long time.

So, if you really want a VM that runs Windows 11, it is (or at least it was) possible to do that. Just see if you can find the documentation you need, and make a few quick registry changes using regedit. Unless Microsoft has gotten even nastier since Windows 11 was new, it should still be easy to create such a VM using a Windows 11 .ISO file. Good luck with your quest.

banger

I ended up manually partitioniing the drive shrinking my Win 10 partition to make a 2gb space for the solus boot files and shrinking my win 11 partition by 100gb to make space for solus files. I was going to replace the Zorin install on 100gb partition but found this impossible as replace partition option kept picking windows boot partition instead of creating a new one.

BuzzPCSOS

WetGeek Windows 11 install is easier on VM's by adding an autounattended.xml script to the iso which will make it bootable on most hardware. I used PowerISO which runs nicely under Solus.
The unattended file adds many of the tweaks applied under Chris Titus's Winutil script so you additionally end up with an install that is more privacy orientated than the standard version.

WetGeek

BuzzPCSOS

Thanks! If I ever decide I need a Windows 11 VM, I'll certainly look into that.

Axios

BuzzPCSOS Hey I thought I was the only one that modified Iso's..lol
Poweriso and me are buds when I was heavy into making my own rescue Disk.
Its always installed.

BuzzPCSOS

WetGeek More good advice would be to avoid if possible. I tinkered for a while but every time they did something I liked, it all got changed for the worse on the next update.
I need Windows for the odd occasion when I want to use my flatbed scanner. Windows 10 runs fine so I use that in a VM and will just switch off internet when support stops in October 2025. Everything else happens in Solus and I am very happy about that.

banger

Not to be picky but that autounattend,xml script hasn't been tested on 24H2, it's probably ok but I like messing with the latest releases. I am an insider and thats why I want Solus as my daily driver as it seems the most up to date rolling distro there is and I like the function of Plasma.

BuzzPCSOS

banger quite right, there will probably be an update soonish as it has been quite well maintained so far. Once you know what it is you are looking for, there are plenty of pre built autounattended.xml variants available with different features depending on what you want to achieve.
I prefer using something like this that I can inspect rather than a closed source tweaking tool.
This will not work for updates within the GUI there are other less gentle tools for that but for a simple install onto a VM it is an elegant solution.

WetGeek

BuzzPCSOS More good advice would be to avoid if possible.

Indeed good advice. My only current need for Windows is to run a Brother label-maker for which there's apparently no driver available for Linux. But I haven't actually needed that device for a couple of years now, and Solus Plasma handles everything else I need a computer for.