Oz Unity: DiamondII-B Installation/Navigation Problems

[gudziel]

I'm installing this distro onto my company's laptop Dell Precision M6600, specs:

Intel i7-2760QM @ 2.40GHz
32.0 DDR3 RAM
Windows 7 64-bit
Dual Monitor (24" along with laptop screen)

I installed it via BOOT setup and I received an alert that the video settings were set to low, which is fine. Now all of the computers here run on Windows 7 and I was worried that I would not have internet access through the network as I need to log in with my Windows credentials. But everything was fine and I had internet access (although I was not seemingly able to change my credentials from the default (forget what it is at this current time).

A couple of oddities that I need help with though which any advice would be greatly appreciated:

- Running two monitors (able to use my 24" while my laptop screen displayed Linux initialization prompts)
- When clicking (forget the word at the top left), a menu bar drops down the left hand side. Those icons are monochrome and the background goes black behind it.

Biggest worry:
- I want this to be a dual boot system with Windows 7 and Linux, using either or at my leisure. This is especially important since we use Microsoft Outlook for our email accts. When I went to shutdown, I saw the laptop screen fill with lines of failures that were occurring while the 24" displayed the white background with the Unity symbol. A command instructed me to remove the disc in my drive, which I did and I pressed enter but nothing happened. The laptop screen remained full of errors and there were no changes. I was forced to power off the computer manually and reboot. After doing so, it went straight to Windows 7. I did not receive a BOOT notification of which OS I wanted (such as one you get when Ubuntu is installed for Dual Boot Mode). Take a wild guess, I did not install Dual Boot Mode properly on this machine.

Any help with figuring out these self-induced problems would be greatly appreciated!!! Thank you guys!!!

 

[DevynCJohnson]

@ryanvade this is Oz Unity, any idea?

@gudziel, you could try installing Oracle's Virtual box (also called VBox). This is an application that runs on Windows. You can install Linux in VBox and run Linux as if it were one mega-program on Windows.

Many people have problems dual-booting with Windows 7 and/or 8. It is possible though.

How is the storage device partitioned? Generally, you will want one partition for Windows, one for Linux, one for swap, and one for personal files.

 

[ryanvade]

Thank you for trying Oz Unity. I am thinking that you are using Diamond II-B KDE..

From what I am seeing, the OS is not using the correct graphics drivers. Unfortunately this is pretty common with Diamond II-B KDE because of issues with Ubuntu 13.04 which is the base. Taking a look at detailed specs for that model you probably have Nvidia optimus. NVIDIA Optimus™ technology intelligently provides graphics performance when you need it and can help extend battery life when you don’t. Check out my article on Optimus and how to use it on Linux.
http://www.linux.org/threads/nvidia-optimus-on-linux.4415/

As for installing the system next to Windows 7. Right now I also dual boot with Windows 7. On the HDD I have 3 partitions.
1. UEFI boot partition. I allow Windows to control the MBR/UEFI boot setup. The Windows boot loader can chainload GRUB using a program called EasyBCD. Definitely take a look at that.
2. The Windows 7 partition
3. Now this is the tricky part. I don't like using the full 4 partitions on a HDD. So, I created an extended partition. This third partition actually had 2 partitions in it. My root partition and home partition.

When I installed Diamond II-B KDE on my laptop, I told the installer to put GRUB on the root partition not the MBR/UEFI boot partition. Then used EasyBCD to add grub to the windows boot loader options menu.