Hi everyone,
I’ve been a happy user of Fedora Workstation since Fedora 36 on my Surface Go 1.
I really enjoy Gnome and everything is set up the way I want to.
Since I was really happy with my setup I just wanted to be able to replicate it easily through Clonezilla so that I could port it on any future computer I’d get.
Sadly, even with the help of really helpful and knowledgeable users on Lemmy, it hasn’t worked (https://sh.itjust.works/post/25963065).
So now I’m left wondering if there could be a distribution that I’d enjoy and which would be easy to deploy on another computer as I’d hate to have to configure everything on every computer I’d get.
I love Gnome but I wouldn’t be against trying something else if necessary.
What distribution could meet my needs?
nixos
Ubuntu will boot on either legacy or UEFI.
That’s not necessarily the problem here.
Normally, Fedora would boot on both types of systems, too. However, OP wants to copy an already-existing UEFI install or at least the config to a legacy system, not (necessarily) to find a distro that could be installed from a normal live installer on both boot types.
Thus the Nix recommendations, as theoretically, one centralized config could be copied between systems to create a similar environment on different systems.
@data1701d Ok in that case, boot the os off of a USB and mount all the partitions, start with root on /mnt, then any other partitions relative to /mnt as they would be to root, then mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev, mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts, mount --rbind /sys /mnt/sys, mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc, and then cp /etc/resolv.conf to /mnt/etc/resolv.conf, now chroot /mnt. Once there remove all existing versions of grub and install grub-pc, which is the bios version, next do grub_install /dev/sda or whatever your primary drive is, then exit chroot and halt the system. Now you should have a bios bootable system you can boot on your bios device.
I just discovered the source of all your problems by reading your previous post.
The Surface Go 1 is a UEFI system. The Acer Aspire 5737z is a legacy BIOS system and thus can’t boot UEFI partitions. If your Aspire was a UEFI system, what you did probably would have worked just fine - no need for a special snazzy distro (no offense, NixOS users).
I’m actually extremely surprised no one noticed this before me.
From here, you have a few routes:
- Flash the install to the drive, and try to downgrade it to a legacy BIOS system.
- I would not recommend doing this. Your life will probably become a living nightmare. If you love pain, though, here’s a forum post to get you started: https://askubuntu.com/questions/910409/change-from-uefi-to-legacy
- Reinstall Fedora and copy just your Gnome config over - from what I can tell, it’s just a few directories.
- This is a Python script that says it exports all that crap for you, but what do I know? I just use XFCE.
- Buy a slightly newer device (maybe 2012/2013-ish at the earlist, probably originally designed for Windows 8.x) that support UEFI so you could just use the image.
- Honestly, I am a bit conflicted on this option, as I don’t exactly like not reusing the Aspire. However, this may be the easiest way out, and maybe you could put the Aspire to use as a server in a home lab instead.
- Try NixOS like others have been saying. Learning things is fun when you have the time - I don’t, and so stick with Debian.
Nixos and mynixos website helps you create your config if you don’t know how or don’t want to
I don’t know how clonezilla works, but one thing I’ve discovered that causes issues when you copy a Linux distro from one machine to another, assuming you do a file system copy and not a raw partition copy so the new file system partition has a different UUID than the old, you need to fix the UUID in both /etc/fstab and /etc/initramfs-tools/resume before it will work properly.
