The Challenges of Installing Linux on Laptops with SSDs

One of the issues with laptops equipped with solid-state drives (SSDs) is that it can be increasingly difficult to access the boot menu. This requires having incredibly fast eyes and fingers to navigate through the options, making it a daunting task for many users.

To overcome this challenge, we used a command-line utility called um to extract the ISO of the Linux distribution from our USB storage device. We then attempted to boot from the USB stick multiple times to ensure that it was recognized by the laptop's BIOS. The process involved copying and pasting commands from a webpage to achieve the desired outcome.

After successfully booting into the Linux distribution, we were greeted with an unusual setup screen featuring a blank purple background with a disability accessibility option symbol. However, this screen quickly disappeared as the operating system loaded, leaving us wondering what had just happened. Despite this initial hiccup, we were relieved to find that the Linux distribution was loading relatively quickly compared to our Windows machine.

One of the unique features of the Linux distribution is its ability to run seamlessly without making any changes to the existing operating system. This means that users can try out the new OS without fear of losing their data or disrupting their current setup. We tested this feature by booting from the USB stick and attempting to install it, only to discover that it would not make any permanent changes to the laptop's configuration.

To further test the Linux distribution, we installed a few drivers and attempted to play YouTube videos. To our surprise, everything worked out of the box, with no issues or errors reported. This bodes well for users who are interested in exploring the world of Linux without having to worry about compatibility issues or technical hiccups.

The Raspberry Pi Model B was another laptop that we decided to test the Linux distribution on. We used a command-line utility called DD to extract the ISO from our USB storage device and attempted to boot from it using the laptop's BIOS. The installation process was straightforward, with no complications or difficulties reported.

After successfully installing the Linux distribution on both laptops, we were left with mixed feelings about its performance. While some features, such as the ability to run LibreOffice seamlessly without issues, worked well, others, like rendering Microsoft Office formats, experienced problems. Despite these minor drawbacks, it is clear that this Linux distribution has potential and could be a viable option for users looking to switch to an open-source operating system.

In conclusion, our experience with installing Linux on laptops with SSDs has been largely positive. The process involved some technical difficulties, but the end result was well worth the effort. We were able to successfully install the Linux distribution without making any permanent changes to our existing operating systems, and everything worked out of the box. Whether you're a seasoned tech user or just looking for a new challenge, exploring the world of Linux could be an exciting and rewarding experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're going to try and revive this very old machine which I've been told it's 8 years old running XP it's running a Core 2 Duo which is quite impressive for its age and the screen is lovely but it is unfortunately very slow so if I go here and I open up my computer waiting waiting waiting and there it's open okay so that was substantially longer than we would expect from a modern day machine but besides that nothing's crashed while I've been using it it's fairly stable and nice but support for XP is being cut off soon there's a large portion of the windows community at the moment who are reluctant to move forward to Windows 7 or Windows eight now especially and it can be quite expensive to upgrade to an operating system you don't want in the first place so the best alternative for many people is to try Linux I missed that noise it's like Nostalgia and a computer noise so if you look at some of the pop systems nowadays like for example the arm Chromebook by Samsung the series 8 I think it is that was bestseller on Amazon over Christmas in terms of size and portability and power consumption modern systems such as series 8 are better but performance- wise they're not too removed from this and the reason that they are able to be as quick and snappy as they are is with the minimized operating system installed in them so in the case of the Samsung Chromebook it's chrom OS and chromos is very stripped down it's built on electric distribution in this case genu and it's really quick and very capable and this is a similar principle to what we're doing here we're taking a much lighter fresher operating system and this will be like a new machine aside from the weight the power consumption I mean the battery on this is decayed a bit so it's got to be plugged into the AC all the time and the AC speaking of which is held together with a a bit of silicon foam there usage wise it will be much fresher much friendlier and will be a completely different experience what it was before the version of two we're using is 12.04 so that's the version released in April 2012 and that was the last long-term support version so they released a new version the new version releases The Cutting Edge one but then every now and then they release a long-term support version um and this is a version that they've basically got to a stage where they think this is perfectly stable this is Rock Solid this is suitable for us by industry and people who need this offering system to be stable for years to come so like this machine is still reliable using XP now machines will be using uh2 12.04 probably for decades yet there'll be new long-term support versions before then but the idea is that they won't have to upgrade they can stick with the system for a long time the process we're going to go through uh in brief is download an operating system uh in this case in buntu 12.04 write it to a USB stick and then your computer can boot from it and you can get the operating system straight away so if I start unet booting essentially it's made for installing Linux distributions onto Windows machines so as you can see we've got this list here of Linux distributions can choose to download if you did just want to download one fresh you could just download unet boot without going to any other website and choose which one you wanted but we've got no internet connection right now but we've already downloaded ours so we're going to ignore the step entirely so I'm going to find the dis image which is on the desktop which could take me a while your net boot is really simple you set it off you don't have to do anything so we are now extracting and copying the files the something cool about this is that when this is done this USB stick will be live bootable you can plug this USB stick into a computer set the computer to boot from it um and you'll have a Linux operating system that you can use straight away from the USB stick without installing it you can boot into it you can use its programs you can even save files and they'll get ritten into the USB stick but essentially means that you have your own operating system on the go 11 of 198 and it seems to got stuck this is worrying so un Bo is taking quite a long time we've been stuck on 11 out of 198 files for a while now so we thought we'd pop into task manager to see what's going on so this shows what the CPU has been doing over time so we've got the two calls here and then over here we've got kind of a live CPU usage graphs this shows us how much of the processor is being used at the given time we're doing a simple extraction here it's currently using upwards of 60% the processor it just dipped down a bit but it was using about 65 which is quite an insane amount for a dual core processor but it appears to have gotten unstuck now and it's churning along nicely unet boo is just finished um so we've got installation complete and we can now reboot so now unet Boo's done this USB stick is a fully capable Linux operating system we can boot from it I'm now rebooting the machine and then I'll go into the BIOS and change the boot order um so that instead of booting from the hard drive to the machine it boots straight from the USB stick when you start a machine you get a little screen that says the manufacturer's name so I pressed F12 for boot and I'm now in the boot menu this just allows us to select the desired boot device so internal hard drive is what he normally boots from so we're going to choose the USB storage device so this is now going through to boot this flashing at the moment is probably looking for a operating system on a USB storage device so hopefully this will work if this has worked in a minute we should see the grub menu or not they shouldn't take that long that sounds like the hard drive scanning weirdly enough it's the CD drive might a DVD in it still actually it does but it shouldn't be doing anything with it what DVD you've got Blade Runner nice classic film unfortunately no good for our Linux distribution can't we blade that'd be fantastic so that didn't seem to work uh we got stuck in the flashing white line of Doom for absolutely edes so I'm going to check that the distribution is written properly on much Newell so let's check the file systems there go so that looks did complete and that looks like everything's there it looks like unet bootin has done its job properly and that should be working so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to check whether it's the USB stick whether it's that machine and quickly try booting into it on here mean that's boting up all right we're go for the same process on here I think I've already missed the button though yes I have already missed The Bu was quick this the problem with uh laptops with ssds is increasingly hard to actually get into the boot menu you have to have incredibly fast eyes and fingers to get get is cool okay so I'm in the boot options so I'm going to boot from our USB storage device thanks XP ah operating system not found okay so our USB stick isn't working so we'll try writing it again so we're going to do this using a command line utility called um which will let us extract the iso this disc and um hopefully have some success I don't know the commands off my head so I'm going to copy and paste them from this page I've just checked to see if it's working on this machine so not on our victim it went for it to boot fine boot it up into a buy so now we're going to have the moment of truth and try it on the patient stick is plugged in I don't have to rush and press F12 really quickly on this one right USB storage go that's good we got the first screen so weirdly enough this version pops up with a blank purple screen with just a disability accessibility option symbol and then goes through to nothing which is a bit odd so we're now waiting for it to load the operating system there we go so ENT is now loading so it's is our first taste of umuntu on this machine so we can now try U First without making any Chang to the computer it won't change the existing operating system you w't touch a thing just the USB stick and RAM alternatively we can install L 2 straight away so let try and to first of all and it's pretty Swift compared to um xer already look how quick that stuff is opening I mean I wonder if we could even watch Blade Runner as well as it being free in terms of cost this is free in terms of uh safety assistant effort so if you want to try Linux if you go for the process we've done today um where you put it on USB stick and you try it like this it won't impact your existing system if you go into the boot menu on starting up you don't even permanently change any settings you just temporarily ask a boot from USB and then when you take out and restart you're all good so you can try out have a go see if it's for you if you want to finish you just shut this down take the stick out and then you back to your normal Windows system um or Mac or whatever system you're running on without damaging anything and then once you're ready you can back up install at your own pace but there go five Fox started up we get a small period of loading and flashing but then it's up it's going obviously we've got no internet connection right now but it loaded pretty quickly we do the same for Libra office so the Open office and Libra office site are quite notorious for being reasonably slow but that's pretty chirpy there we go we're into an office application there's got to be some drawbacks here I mean what about using files from Liber office on somewhere else then yeah so um Liber offit so because this is all free and all doing relatively well and so successful there are some kind of passive aggressive attempts to put a stop to it so especially with Libra office you find that it has trouble rendering uh the newer Microsoft Office formats so if you're dealing with uh formats from uh Office 2013 or anything docx sometimes the fancier formatting options don't come up perfectly um and it does mangle documents sometimes um but for the basics it works perfectly and if you save to an older form it's capable of saving to a word format so people with word can open it and as long as you save to an older format it works really well that's not an unbearable waiting time and I'm think this would be a pretty nice system to use so with that should we go straight into installing it so the install menu is really straightforward nothing complicated it ask you to check some different things um we just finished so this 8-year-old system was on XP was taking ages to Bo up was taking ages to open the programs um we've written a two uh link distribution to this USB stick gone for the install process um we've tried out first we then installed it we deleted XP off it and we've booted it up and uh installed a couple of drivers so we can play YouTube videos this sort of thing sound is working out of the box networking is working out of the box it's much quicker everything is working perfectly and to demonstrate we'll end on a nice little we're going to talk a little bit the Rasberry Pi this is the model B Raspberry Pi shipped 5 hours later using a command line utility called DD um which will let us extract the uh ISO so the install menu is really straightforward nothing complicated um it asks you to check some different thingstoday we're going to try and revive this very old machine which I've been told it's 8 years old running XP it's running a Core 2 Duo which is quite impressive for its age and the screen is lovely but it is unfortunately very slow so if I go here and I open up my computer waiting waiting waiting and there it's open okay so that was substantially longer than we would expect from a modern day machine but besides that nothing's crashed while I've been using it it's fairly stable and nice but support for XP is being cut off soon there's a large portion of the windows community at the moment who are reluctant to move forward to Windows 7 or Windows eight now especially and it can be quite expensive to upgrade to an operating system you don't want in the first place so the best alternative for many people is to try Linux I missed that noise it's like Nostalgia and a computer noise so if you look at some of the pop systems nowadays like for example the arm Chromebook by Samsung the series 8 I think it is that was bestseller on Amazon over Christmas in terms of size and portability and power consumption modern systems such as series 8 are better but performance- wise they're not too removed from this and the reason that they are able to be as quick and snappy as they are is with the minimized operating system installed in them so in the case of the Samsung Chromebook it's chrom OS and chromos is very stripped down it's built on electric distribution in this case genu and it's really quick and very capable and this is a similar principle to what we're doing here we're taking a much lighter fresher operating system and this will be like a new machine aside from the weight the power consumption I mean the battery on this is decayed a bit so it's got to be plugged into the AC all the time and the AC speaking of which is held together with a a bit of silicon foam there usage wise it will be much fresher much friendlier and will be a completely different experience what it was before the version of two we're using is 12.04 so that's the version released in April 2012 and that was the last long-term support version so they released a new version the new version releases The Cutting Edge one but then every now and then they release a long-term support version um and this is a version that they've basically got to a stage where they think this is perfectly stable this is Rock Solid this is suitable for us by industry and people who need this offering system to be stable for years to come so like this machine is still reliable using XP now machines will be using uh2 12.04 probably for decades yet there'll be new long-term support versions before then but the idea is that they won't have to upgrade they can stick with the system for a long time the process we're going to go through uh in brief is download an operating system uh in this case in buntu 12.04 write it to a USB stick and then your computer can boot from it and you can get the operating system straight away so if I start unet booting essentially it's made for installing Linux distributions onto Windows machines so as you can see we've got this list here of Linux distributions can choose to download if you did just want to download one fresh you could just download unet boot without going to any other website and choose which one you wanted but we've got no internet connection right now but we've already downloaded ours so we're going to ignore the step entirely so I'm going to find the dis image which is on the desktop which could take me a while your net boot is really simple you set it off you don't have to do anything so we are now extracting and copying the files the something cool about this is that when this is done this USB stick will be live bootable you can plug this USB stick into a computer set the computer to boot from it um and you'll have a Linux operating system that you can use straight away from the USB stick without installing it you can boot into it you can use its programs you can even save files and they'll get ritten into the USB stick but essentially means that you have your own operating system on the go 11 of 198 and it seems to got stuck this is worrying so un Bo is taking quite a long time we've been stuck on 11 out of 198 files for a while now so we thought we'd pop into task manager to see what's going on so this shows what the CPU has been doing over time so we've got the two calls here and then over here we've got kind of a live CPU usage graphs this shows us how much of the processor is being used at the given time we're doing a simple extraction here it's currently using upwards of 60% the processor it just dipped down a bit but it was using about 65 which is quite an insane amount for a dual core processor but it appears to have gotten unstuck now and it's churning along nicely unet boo is just finished um so we've got installation complete and we can now reboot so now unet Boo's done this USB stick is a fully capable Linux operating system we can boot from it I'm now rebooting the machine and then I'll go into the BIOS and change the boot order um so that instead of booting from the hard drive to the machine it boots straight from the USB stick when you start a machine you get a little screen that says the manufacturer's name so I pressed F12 for boot and I'm now in the boot menu this just allows us to select the desired boot device so internal hard drive is what he normally boots from so we're going to choose the USB storage device so this is now going through to boot this flashing at the moment is probably looking for a operating system on a USB storage device so hopefully this will work if this has worked in a minute we should see the grub menu or not they shouldn't take that long that sounds like the hard drive scanning weirdly enough it's the CD drive might a DVD in it still actually it does but it shouldn't be doing anything with it what DVD you've got Blade Runner nice classic film unfortunately no good for our Linux distribution can't we blade that'd be fantastic so that didn't seem to work uh we got stuck in the flashing white line of Doom for absolutely edes so I'm going to check that the distribution is written properly on much Newell so let's check the file systems there go so that looks did complete and that looks like everything's there it looks like unet bootin has done its job properly and that should be working so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to check whether it's the USB stick whether it's that machine and quickly try booting into it on here mean that's boting up all right we're go for the same process on here I think I've already missed the button though yes I have already missed The Bu was quick this the problem with uh laptops with ssds is increasingly hard to actually get into the boot menu you have to have incredibly fast eyes and fingers to get get is cool okay so I'm in the boot options so I'm going to boot from our USB storage device thanks XP ah operating system not found okay so our USB stick isn't working so we'll try writing it again so we're going to do this using a command line utility called um which will let us extract the iso this disc and um hopefully have some success I don't know the commands off my head so I'm going to copy and paste them from this page I've just checked to see if it's working on this machine so not on our victim it went for it to boot fine boot it up into a buy so now we're going to have the moment of truth and try it on the patient stick is plugged in I don't have to rush and press F12 really quickly on this one right USB storage go that's good we got the first screen so weirdly enough this version pops up with a blank purple screen with just a disability accessibility option symbol and then goes through to nothing which is a bit odd so we're now waiting for it to load the operating system there we go so ENT is now loading so it's is our first taste of umuntu on this machine so we can now try U First without making any Chang to the computer it won't change the existing operating system you w't touch a thing just the USB stick and RAM alternatively we can install L 2 straight away so let try and to first of all and it's pretty Swift compared to um xer already look how quick that stuff is opening I mean I wonder if we could even watch Blade Runner as well as it being free in terms of cost this is free in terms of uh safety assistant effort so if you want to try Linux if you go for the process we've done today um where you put it on USB stick and you try it like this it won't impact your existing system if you go into the boot menu on starting up you don't even permanently change any settings you just temporarily ask a boot from USB and then when you take out and restart you're all good so you can try out have a go see if it's for you if you want to finish you just shut this down take the stick out and then you back to your normal Windows system um or Mac or whatever system you're running on without damaging anything and then once you're ready you can back up install at your own pace but there go five Fox started up we get a small period of loading and flashing but then it's up it's going obviously we've got no internet connection right now but it loaded pretty quickly we do the same for Libra office so the Open office and Libra office site are quite notorious for being reasonably slow but that's pretty chirpy there we go we're into an office application there's got to be some drawbacks here I mean what about using files from Liber office on somewhere else then yeah so um Liber offit so because this is all free and all doing relatively well and so successful there are some kind of passive aggressive attempts to put a stop to it so especially with Libra office you find that it has trouble rendering uh the newer Microsoft Office formats so if you're dealing with uh formats from uh Office 2013 or anything docx sometimes the fancier formatting options don't come up perfectly um and it does mangle documents sometimes um but for the basics it works perfectly and if you save to an older form it's capable of saving to a word format so people with word can open it and as long as you save to an older format it works really well that's not an unbearable waiting time and I'm think this would be a pretty nice system to use so with that should we go straight into installing it so the install menu is really straightforward nothing complicated it ask you to check some different things um we just finished so this 8-year-old system was on XP was taking ages to Bo up was taking ages to open the programs um we've written a two uh link distribution to this USB stick gone for the install process um we've tried out first we then installed it we deleted XP off it and we've booted it up and uh installed a couple of drivers so we can play YouTube videos this sort of thing sound is working out of the box networking is working out of the box it's much quicker everything is working perfectly and to demonstrate we'll end on a nice little we're going to talk a little bit the Rasberry Pi this is the model B Raspberry Pi shipped 5 hours later using a command line utility called DD um which will let us extract the uh ISO so the install menu is really straightforward nothing complicated um it asks you to check some different things\n"