Hello and good day.
I should probably start by giving a summary of my current expertise. I've operated a computer repair shop for about 11 years for Windows computers. I've been able to accomplish a ridiculous amount with them over the years and make just about every piece of hardware work, somehow. Rebuilt 13 computers for an old dentist office with P4 3GHz HT computers and 2GB of RAM and put Windows 7 on them. I had no issues with drivers, old Windows 98 software, or anything. Even the 12 year old printers worked flawlessly. Since I did a thermal grease job on everything, used thermal adhesive on heatsinks for chips when necessary, the computers still work flawlessly to this day. They leave their computers running 24/7 because they only have 6 hours of downtime and I told them it'd probably be best to just leave it on. Since I gave them a router with DD-WRT and used a heatsink and fan on it, their network never drops, either. I aim for perfect stability in all of my systems and take considerable time in choosing my hardware. I know every laptop in this house like the back of my hand and I remember people by their computer hardware, not their faces.
Anyhow, as a side project, I pulled out my Acer ZG5 with a 1.6GHz Atom, 1.5GB of RAM, and a 120GB Kingston SSD. It's slow, but it's still nice to have. Overclocking is possible if I do a little soldering and push the FSB, but I'd rather not if I don't have to.
After doing quite a bit of research on these laptops, I've managed to get Android x86, Snow Leopard, and Windows 10 x86 on this thing. I've got the hard drive in three different partitions and Android was my last install. I can boot to Windows just fine, but GRUB never shows, even though there's no UEFI support for this computer.
I'm new to the Linux world and have no idea where to start. I understand everything in a Windows format, but for what I do, I never really have to do things that don't have some kind of GUI to take care of everything.
I've read for hours, trying to figure out how I can get some kind of bootloader onto this thing. Did I need to start over; did I do things in the wrong order?
I want to become more familiar with Linux, but when your house is full of nothing but Windows PCs, I have absolutely no clue where to start. I'd REALLY appreciate any kind of help/guide to get started in becoming familiar in this. Android 4 runs wonderfully on this little laptop and people have even upgraded to 5 and 6, I believe. Had the wifi working under Android as it saw my replacement wireless card. I'm going to replace it with something that will be compatible with all OSes and, hopefully, have Bluetooth.
I am completely lost, have tried a number of things, and can't seem to get anywhere. The farthest I got was mounting hda4 with my Android partition, but any attempt to install GRUB fails horribly. I really had no clue that, even being way beyond almost everyone I've ever met working on Windows machines, I would feel like such an idiot when hoping to switch to something open-sourced. I'm willing to bet that Microsoft designed their operating system to do this to people who even have potential.
Thank you for any advice you may have to offer.
Adv Reply
Bookmarks