[GTALUG] Mini PC for Home Office?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: phiscock at ee.ryerson.ca

| I was impressed by the packaging and build quality of the computer. I was
| not impressed by Windows 8.1, which is a real dog's breakfast of Selling
| Stuff and Requesting All Your Information, and a really badly designed UI.

When you first log into Win8.1, they want you to use a Microsoft
identity (i.e. in the cloud).  Only when you cancel do they offer you
the choice of local credentials.  This is not obvious and most folks
get tricked.

| So I downloaded the latest version of Linux Mint and installed that as a
| dual-boot system. For those that haven't done this - first you use the
| partition tool in Win8.1 to reduce the size of the windows partition,
| freeing up space.

In my experience, the Windows partitioning tool will only reduce the
space to about half.  That's not good enough for me.  Instead, I use a
Linux tool to shrink the Win partition a whole lot.  But that damages
the Win parition so you have to immediately boot into Windows (before
creating new partitions) and have it do a repair.  This is witchcraft.

(I think that Windows puts something immoveable in the middle of the
partition and linux just ignores that.)

| At the end of the installation we have a dual-boot selection menu that
| comes up on power-on, and we can select either operating system. Both
| operating systems detected and connected to the wireless network without
| any fuss, which is convenient.

Are you using UEFI or old-fashioned BIOS/MBR booting?  Does MINT
support Secure Boot?

| In the previous install process, on an Asus laptop, the grub boot menu is
| somehow accessible only from inside Windows and there is a lengthy
| song-and-dance needed to get to it.

That sounds odd.  I guess you are using some Windows boot manager.