Xubuntu install on Win7 laptop fails

[Xen]

MR ZenWiz schreef op 12-07-2017 1:41:

> I booted gparted and deleted the partitions, but then Xubuntu said I
> need a boot partition (not a /boot partition - I don't use that
> anyway) and it would not accept the 1MB empty space in front of
> /dev/sda1.
> 
> I don't want to mess with the MS partitions... is this even doable?

I am sorry I cannot provide any help but I stay away from UEFI.

Lots of people say UEFI is great but the elephant is in the room: it was 
devised by Intel and other large corps to deal with huge computer farms, 
not for individual computers. You will need to install Ubuntu into the 
same UEFI partition that Windows uses.

I have never heard an account where UEFI was not a nightmare. Sure for 
lots of people it will work, but we never hear them, nor do we ever hear 
actual positive comments about it, except when in response to criticism.

There are never people saying "Oh I love UEFI" because it doesn't 
actually solve any problems and when it works, people are more inclined 
to not care than to actually be enthusiastic about it in any way. On 
these support channels and others (like Grub) UEFI is really always a 
*problem* to a greater extent than BIOS was.

It is *always* complicating things and half of the time it is someone 
who cannot boot their DVD in UEFI mode or something like that. There is 
some confusion of course between the BIOS boot and the UEFI partition 
and not all distributions take the same approach so now you have 
*different* Linux ways of dealing with UEFI as well, just as with BTRFS.

The complexity goes up and up and up without any added benefit.

If there was just one way of doing things, it would be fine, but there 
isn't.

You now need a PhD in UEFI to be able to install your computer, so to 
speak.

 From these support threads I find that even the people that know about 
it are often confused and not very eager to deal with the complexities 
that result from it. If I remember correctly, on the Kubuntu forum there 
was a HUGE UEFI thread that was completely unreadable and this only 
evidences its complexity.

I really don't know why you would advocate this thing but I guess it's 
because "It's there and you have to live with it."

It is now used by Microsoft to prevent people from installing Linux on 
its newest laptops.

Trusted Platform Modules have about the same effect. Encryption in 
hardware, okay...

Intel CPUs have features that allow for remote management probably (very 
very likely) by intelligence agencies (or very easy for them to gain 
access to it).

Control over your own PC is going down the drain more and more.

The entire idea of Linux was to be in control. Yet those same people 
support changes to the landscape that reduce the control real people 
have over their computers.

SystemD for example is almost impossible to alter for the ordinary 
person. Before, shell scripts. Now, binaries. What can you do about it? 
Nothing. Use it as is.

The whole idea of binaries is to provide something that is hard to 
change and thereby easy to guarantee. A Java binary is more "solid" than 
a Python script.

But the software becomes much more opaque as well in many cases and in 
our landscape we lose control.

There was nothing being solved by UEFI to begin with, for the ordinary 
person.

So are we better off? No, not at all. Even if you say UEFI is not bad or 
it has merits, are we better off? No. Unequivocal no.