Guide for Dual Boot with Windows
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Contents |
Introduction
This is going to be a very basic, beginners guide to installing Chakra, and were applicable, side by side with a Windows installation. Were possible the Graphical User Interface (in plain English, point & click) will be used. Chakra is Arch based, so some Command Line Interface is necessary. Hopefully, by the end of this guide, you will be comfortable enough with the Terminal & CLI, that you'll be able to see the benefits and speed of it and are happy to use a combination of GUI & CLI. Here it is assumed the only Operating System available to start with is Windows (any version).
Chakra will make an Arch + KDEmod insatllation much less time consuming, but still tries to adhere to the principles of Arch, to keep a system were the user has all the control to make a system to their liking, and keep it simple. Because of that, this install will ask for more user intervention, then some other distro's during install. In this guide, that principle will be used as much as possible. So, when an automated or advanced option is available, the latter will be used.
Eventhough this guide is geared toward dual booting with Windows, many of the topics here will be the same, and apply to any install. Chapters dealing with Windows specific issues are clearly marked as such.
Download & creating install medium
Before downloading your copy of Chakra, you will need to decide what you want from this new system. Do you just want the minimum installed, and choose your own favorite software to add, in that case the CD is the most suitable. Or do you prefer to have a lot of software already available, right after the install, in that case choose the DVD. Both have the basics for web-browsing, file-management, printing, cd/dvd burning, e-mail, PDF-viewing, simple text editing and media player available. For a complete list: what's included
A little bit about choosing between x86_64 (64-bit) and i686 (32-bit). First of, a 64bit capable processor is needed for x86_64, for the rest, and this is just a very general rule, when you have less then 3Gb RAM, there is very little benefit for x86_64, 3Gb or more, most hardware that runs that, will benefit from x86_46. 32 bit can use a maximum of 3.2Gb of RAM, so with 4GB installed, you cannot use your hardware to the fullest with i686.
Time to download your copy, now that you have made your decisions: Download. After the download is completed, check the MD5sum. If you are not familiar with that see Wikipedia Md5sum.
To create a bootable medium from your downloaded ISO, you can choose to use a USB stick using LILI, this method needs a bit more testing. From Windows, the safest way to create a good live medium, is to burn the ISO to a CD or DVD. Unfortunately, the native ISO burning software in Windows does not give you the option to set the burn speed. A speed up 16x is considered safe, slower might still be better. There are several good & free ISO burning programs available imgburn is one option.
For Netbooks it most probably will be necessary to have an USB-stick as bootable medium. Once the LiveCD/DVD is created, you can boot into that and use dd to create it, if LILI is not usable for you. See Start our LiveCD iso's from USB. Chakra fully supports NTFS (the Windows file system), so while in LiveCD, you can access all your files in the C drive, including the downloaded ISO. To be able to use the dd command line, as used in the aforementioned link, you will have to change the directory shown in the Terminal, which is the home directory. Chakra has Konsole and Yakuake available as Terminals, in this guide, Yakuake will be used. Start yakuake with F12 (F12 is used to show and minimize yakuake).
You probably saved the ISO on the desktop, or in the Download folder. Use the following in yakuake to change the directory to the desktop:
cd /media/disk/Users/your_user_name/Desktop/
Or change the above path to the correct location.
Preparing hard-disk
For clarity in this guide, it will be kept as simple as possible, so this will cover only one hard drive available. Most installs will have only one partition (the C drive), but if a second partition (D drive) is available, it usually is for data, and does not effect this install, and will not be used in this guide.
Anytime changes are made to the hard drive, there is always a chance of mistakes, failures, so make sure that all important data is safely backed-up.
Before being able to install Chakra, some room needs to be created on your C drive. This can be done by shrinking that partition. Go to:
Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.
Right click on the C drive, select Shrink Volume, and enter the amount of space to shrink. How much space you can create depends on your hard drive and how much data is installed, but a very minimum of 3Gb is needed for the install from the CD, 6 Gb form the DVD.
Here it is assumed that 25Gb is now available as "unallocated space" for the Chakra install
Installation
Before you will be able to boot into a LiveCD (that is from CD, DVD or USB-stick), you will have to make sure, that the boot order in the BIOS is set, so it will look for a DVD/CD-rom drive and/or USB medium, before it will use the hard drive. To enter the BIOS, you will have to hit a certain key, right after you start your system, oftentimes that is the esc or del key, but that can also be F2 or F10. Please look up the documentation of your motherboard, if these don't work, and find the right one for your system. Edit the boot order, if necessary.
The first screen you will see, when starting the LiveCD, will ask you about your language selection:
Use the up/down arrows for your selection and hit enter.
The next screen will ask you about your graphics card, what driver to use:
image coming
Chances are, that you have one of three graphics cards, Intel, ATI or Nvidia. For Intel & ATI, use the first selection, so "start". For Nvidia, choose the non-free driver and hit enter.
Once your LiveCD has loaded, you can use Chakra like a regular OS, web browsing, media-player, all will function the same, and you will notice, there is very little speed difference compared to a regular install. You can also download & install other programs, but once you shut the system down, they will no longer be available ( all was loaded into RAM).
Here though, the goals is to have Chakra installed on your hard drive.
On your desktop, click the "installation" icon, and Tribe, Chakra's installer will start. Please read through the pages carefully, and make sure you agree with/understand the options presented, before clicking "next".
After accepting all the licenses, it is time to select your location, language and desired keyboard layout:
image coming
You can rotate the globe, zoom in & out and select your location, or use the drop-down menu. Once you choose a location, language and keyboard layout are automatically selected, please check, and change, if it is not the setting you want.
The next page will ask you, whether you want to select the best mirrors during install. There are three options now. Untick, no mirrors will be set, and after the install you'll have to edit /etc/pacman.d/kdemodmirrorlist and /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist . The advantage of this is, you will have all the available mirrors, from all over the world right there, all of them are disabled ( a # in front of them). You can select any of them by removing # from your selection. The first one on your list is the one looked at first. For editing the mirrorlists, see instructions for adding Windows to GRUB, choose the GUI or CLI method, and use the /etc/pacman.d/kedmodmirrorlist or mirrorlist as location.
Second option is to leave the check mark, but make sure you are not online during the install. The mirrorlists will be set this way, but might not be the best selection for your location. Big advantage of an offline install is time, it will take less then five minutes to install Chakra this way. Changing to different mirrors after install is not hard or time consuming.
Third option is checked mirrors and online install, the best mirrors for your location will be set, but the install will pause for about 15-30 minutes at 81%, finding those best mirrors.
Partition Page
Clicking next will bring up the partition page, were you will choose how you want to set up your hard drive. You can try all kinds of settings, selecting different partition and so for, nothing is final here. Even clicking next will not make any changes, it will only show how the hard drive will be formatted and how the partition layout will be, clicking next on this page will start the format and cannot be reversed.
The default option here is "easy mode". For this guide, the advanced mode will be used, so check "advanced". You'll see your disk layout as you have left it after creating the unallocated space in Windows. That will be a NTFS partition, unallocated space (and another NTFS partition, if there was a D drive). Highlight the unallocated space, by clicking on it, and select "new". This first partition will be used as root, all partitions will be branched off, of this one. Select the size of this new partition by typing the selected size or using the slide. In this guide, 16 Gb of the 25 Gb available, will be used here. Choose ext4 , and set the mount point to /
Next, choose "new" again, this time /var will be set. Set this at 6 Gb, choose reiser, an set mount point to /var
The last partition set in this example will be for swap. So again choose "new", the number that is left will be used, choose linuxswap, and the mountpoint will already be set for this partition.
There are many other options available, some people prefer to have a separate /home partition for their data/personal setting, but since the C drive is already available for that too, it is not chosen here. On desktops, it is not strictly necessary to set swap, when a) suspend/hibernate are not used, and b) as a general rule, at least 1Gb of RAM is available.
Now highlight (click) "linux extended", this is were the partitioner will install Chakra.
Clicking next will show you exactly what will be done, if you see a mistake or want to change something, just click back. The setup you just created will be lost, and the disk is reverted back to the original state. So start again, in the same order, setting root first.
After all is exactly the way you want, click next, and the install will begin. Again, this cannot be reverted.
Adding Windows to GRUB
Now that the install is finished, and you have booted into your new Chakra OS, there might be a bit of a sinking feeling, since during startup, there was no sign of the Windows OS. It is all still there, you will just have to let GRand Unified Bootloader know to look for windows.
To do so you will have to edit the menu.lst, and add Windows to it.
GUI method:
Open Dolphin (either by clicking on "home" on the Desktop, or Alt-F2 and typing dolphin), the file manager. Select "View" and mark "Show hidden Files". In the "places" column, click on root, then select the "boot" folder, then "grub", right click on menu.lst > root actions > Open as text > type in your root password. And at the at end of the menu.lst add:
title Windows root (hd0,0) chainloader +1 makeactive
And click safe.
CLI method: Again, start yakuake with Alt-F2 yakuake, from now on you can use F12 to show and minimize yakuake. Now type or copy & paste:
sudo kate /boot/grub/menu.lst
and hit enter, type in your root password, and use the same instructions as above to add Windows.
To set the default OS and the time before GRUB starts that default:
System Settings > Advanced tab > Grub Editor > click OK twice on pop-ups
In "entries" you will now see Arch Linux (marked as default), Arch Linux Fallback & Windows. Probably no chances needed, for Chakra will be the preferred OS :)
Under "Options", untick Hide Boot Menu, and set a comfortable time for Boot Default Entry (probably 6-10 seconds, this is the time you have during boot up to select other option then default). Hit "Apply" and enter your root password.
For a much more in depth explanation of GRUB, go to GRUB in ArchWiki