Episode: 3798
Title: HPR3798: Laptop Second SSD MXLinux Install
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3798/hpr3798.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:29:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3798 for Wednesday, the 22nd of February 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Laptop 2nd S.S.D. with M.X. Linux Install.
It is part of the series hardware upgrades.
It is hosted by Mekatroniac and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is overcoming UEFI and Windows 10 to install M.X. Linux 21.3 on a 2021 ASUS laptop,
2nd S.S.D. Drive.
Greetings.
This is Mekatroniac in this episode, I'm going to describe installing M.X. Linux on
2nd Hard Drive on my laptop and my first impressions with this operating system.
So I've tried a few other distros on this and for various reasons they didn't work out
slack where it couldn't adjust the brightness and there's some other problem with it.
It didn't have OBS installed, open broadcaster software, Zenn Floder 2 said it had and I got
the biggest ISO on the site and I could find and did not have it on there for some reason.
So fake news there, squirrel fake news, Dev1 also didn't see the Wi-Fi for that so one
couldn't be used either but and both of those, like I had this problem with Grub.
The slack where it didn't install Grub in the EFI, I guess there's the EFI partition
in the Windows, I forgot to say I've been running Windows for the last year or so just because
of convenience and inertia I suppose and I wanted to play my pirated copy of San Andreas.
But anyway so yeah it's time to switch, like Windows is pretty annoying.
The file system, sometimes you can't even find files that you know are in the directory
that you're looking at, it's bizarre but I have too many files maybe.
So yeah this EFI, not too fond of it, I understand that there was limitations to BIOS but
why didn't they just make a better BIOS instead of this CRUD?
Computers are really great now, I mean I really love this computer and then some MBA over
at Intel decided to make it shitty with this EFI and what I mean is before you're able
to just put another hard drive in, have two hard drives and choose which one you want
to boot from but now the boot is controlled from this EFI partition which some people
said was a attempt by Microsoft to make it so that non Microsoft operating systems couldn't
be booted but apparently that's not true but yeah so that's definitely a security downgrade
since obviously it's better to have a completely separate boot hard drive rather than have
the boot be dependent on the other hard drive than you're using for your OS, I mean that's
kind of stupid and I think there has been like a zero days found for you EFI as well so
but yeah anything Intel puts out I view with suspicion nowadays so yeah windows annoying
and of course free hardware, free software is good, you'll always have like open source
software or FOS software if possible on all your systems except if it goes into your
body then you should take every non free software they take tell you yet definitely so with
MX Linux, okay so yeah still talking about you EFI so with Slackware when I installed
that it made me make a startup USB and I had to use that startup USB every time and I wanted
to booted to the second hard drive and like what the freaking hell so finally I did some
reading up on grub so I was prepared I was going to actually install grub myself on that
stinkin EFI partition but when I installed MX Linux I was almost disappointed because it did
it automatically so unlike Slackware where it was like maybe I missed something on the install
for Slackware to be fair but that was kind of disappointing to have to plug in a USB stick every
time you want it to boot up so now it boots into grub immediately with MX Linux as the default
selection so that's awesome so first impressions it's the XFCE desktop that I was using I'm not
recording with it now I installed tenacity on that MX Linux install but it didn't appear to be
working so you know I can't I can't give an opinion on that but everything else worked like right
away and that was really impressed that the grub installed automatically so if you have a laptop
you might want to do that but for other reasons spoilers it didn't go up well for other reasons
you might not want to use this if you have a new laptop but it might work for you H top has it
as 841 megabytes at idle which is kind of high but it has a lot of features so a lot of desktop
enhancements and stuff. Conkey it's got a clip manager that shows a whole bunch of like you
last you're last saved stuff last control Cs and seeing that it becomes apparent why they put
the menu bar on the left hand side because you hit on clip man and it shows all this info
and same with browsers it will show all your tabs as like meet little text things that you can
click on that's pretty cool so it's it's kind of it's kind of slick it has I'm really fond of this
it has a startup sound option to start a startup sound which is missing from most operating systems
nowadays which is a travesty I think I think there should be a startup sound demo
so there's yeah Conkey gives you the time and some stats like how much your hard drives being
used and stuff the first wallpapers kind of this primary color really plain thing but they've
got some really nice wallpapers if you go into the desktop settings nice manuals right on the
desktop when you start so that's a really nice touch but a lot of distros you feel kind of on
your own I mean yeah usually they'll have a link in the browser that comes with the system but
it's nice having those PDFs right on the desktop for you so there's a big manual and there's
FAQs boot up is like faster than Windows it also allows you to set the audio up to 150 percent
which is nice because sometimes the video makers have low audio so that's useful I'm not
usually just listening on these laptop speakers so you can't crank them too much so yeah turning
turning up the audio is useful so a few cons including a deal breaker but maybe I'll be able to fix
it I don't know the function button is lit after every boot and I noticed that slackwear did
the same thing yeah I'll have this function button for the extra keys and Bluetooth is on
after every boot after being turned off beforehand and slackwear did that as well
so the USB keyboard and most randomly disconnect and that's the that's the catastrophe here
because I would have tried to live with the other things but I cannot stand to use the laptop
keyboard or trackpad it's just ridiculous it's really bad for you on ergonomic so yeah after a while
it would just disconnect and you couldn't even plug it back in like just like the USB is dead
D message didn't say anything which is bizarre so I think I need like a less hardware support or
something I tried the advanced options in grub there's an option to use the 6.006 kernel
that didn't work and then there's an option to use the 6.006 kernel with system D
I forgot to mention MX Linux that's one of the criteria that I used to choose operating systems
is they not have system D but MX has system D if you need it so I tried it with system D
and it appeared to work but then after about an hour or so it disconnects the USB as well so it
seems like I need an advanced hardware support version it's it's said on this laptop that it was
ready for Ubuntu so I don't know but anyway it's a great computer if you haven't tried a new
generation computer yet rise in of course it's an AMD rise in five and it's it just blows away
anything I've ever had as computer not that I've been keeping up but this generation is so much
ahead of what previous generations were to the generation before it seems like this just a big leap
forward so yeah thanks to AMD and ASUS for that so yeah I'm gonna gonna have to I don't know if
I'm gonna need to try to get like one of those rolling or release ones or something or
because unfortunately Ubuntu uses system D which is sad because I really like Ubuntu Studio
it has a lot of nice software including OBS and Ubuntu Studio is how I discovered Yo Shimi
which I used for the keyboard effects and some of my other podcasts but yeah that's so that's
how to install MX Linux I guess I skipped the part about using Belina Etcher to make the live USB
and then booting from USB pressing F12 boot from USB to the live and then install from there
and yeah like I said it worked really perfectly I was pretty impressed MX Linux looks like a really
nice operating system and I would recommend it it's you can see why it's in the top and I haven't
even talked about half of the features that it has like it's it's a system snapshot feature and
all kinds of other little utilities that it has so it's a nice operating system check it out if
you're distra hopping and haven't found anything good yet but see you next time
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