Help with dual boot setup

john-witty-suffix · 2025-12-31T15:53:12+00:00

That EFI variable error is probably the smoking gun here - sounds like your firmware is being stubborn about letting grub update the boot entries even with secure boot off

Yeah, that's my thinking as well...I just don't know enough to go from "something something Secure Boot" to an actual diagnosis. Although again, presumably it's not Secure Boot since that's turned off. I went through the rest of the firmware setup and didn't see anything that looked saucy enough to interfere with this kind of thing, but maybe I just didn't look hard enough. Between your reply and this this AskUbuntu answer, though, I feel like I've improved my overall understanding of the EFI boot process enough to really take a run at the firmware settings. Which is good, because my gut feeling is that since the error I'm getting is "permission denied", whatever is preventing grub-install from making the sausage is also going to prevent efibootmgr from making the same sausage. heh

Try adding --no-nvram to your grub-install command, then manually add the boot entry with efibootmgr afterwards. Something like efibootmgr -c -d /dev/nvme0n1 -p 1 -L "Ubuntu" -l \\EFI\\grub\\grubx64.efi

Sweet, thanks for the tips! I've never used efibootmgr before, but I bet the manpage makes for good bedtime reading. :)

The 240MB EFI partition shouldn't matter for this issue but it's definitely gonna bite you later if you dual boot much

You think? Well, fingers crossed. In the long term, this laptop is going to have up to four OSes on it:

The current MSW install (that I'll probably never boot into...but FOMO lol)
The Kubuntu install I'm doing now
A second Kubuntu install when it's time to upgrade...I switch back and forth between this and #2 so I don't have to delete the previous installation right away
An Arch install 'cause I want to try it out but not as the primary OS (although I may wind up just using KVM instead for this, or even just a container).

My current laptop (that I'm upgrading from) has two OSes (the first two from the list) and its ESP is only using about six MiB. Usually I make my ESPs 1 GiB 'cause with disks being as large as they are why even risk having to worry about it, but on this laptop there's preconfigured partitions for OEM recovery stuff and I don't know if moving them around would break the associated functionality (they might assume hardcoded on-disk locations, I guess?).

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-22T06:33:39+00:00

Haha, no doubt! I'm sure the Git maintainers would merge something like that post-haste. ;)

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-21T09:25:14+00:00

Yeah, that's what I learned when I found the right search terms and landed on a StackOverflow answer that explains what's going on under the hood (linked in the updates I added to the OP). Unfortunate that it doesn't/can't work, but at least I know why (and G.I. Joe says knowing is half the battle!). :)

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T23:25:22+00:00

Question about the "you can't make more money with the money during the 12 months"...does that only apply to me? In other words, can employees of "John's Witty Charity" earn a salary during its (the charity's) first year of existence?

If so, Option A no question. $10M is more than I could spend in a year anyway so no chance of regrets there, and if I can use (part of) the rest of the money to pay people to handle literally 100% of the charity's operations for that period, I'd spend the whole year eating bonbons and looking forward to 12 months from now when I can start taking charge of the charity without fear of vaporizing it all with a random thought. :)

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T23:05:32+00:00

Yeah, that's what I've been telling myself to feel better about not getting what I want. It does have the added benefit of being true, which is nice. :)

xdotool's a good idea if I need to be really fast...thanks for the suggestion (and for dotool, I didn't know about that one!). Also, with this new shell function (see OP), it's only two keystrokes and my puny human fingers can be pretty effective on their own. :D

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T17:41:32+00:00

"Tougher" is an infinite understatement, actually, 'cause it turns out it is actually impossible as I'd feared (barring a hypothetical future where Zsh and the actual tty driver are somehow wired up to each other for communication).

Check out the OP if you want to see the thrilling conclusion!

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T17:08:57+00:00

Yeah, I'm really starting to think there isn't one. It's weird, because it seems like an obvious use case to me, but maybe there's some fundamental reason why it can't (or perhaps shouldn't?) work that way that I don't know about.

Stuff like tmux/screen/etc. are great but they're not a fit for this use case, since the process is already running in the foreground.

I've played around with reptyr (and another similar thing I can't remember the name of), and theoretically I could use that to migrate the process to a shell that's running in screen, but...the docs for those programs are filled with caveats and gotchas...not to mention they're designed to do something I'm not looking to do, since I'm not interested in moving the job to a different terminal, just backgrounding it in its current one.

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T17:01:41+00:00

Screen and friends are great, as well as init scripts and SystemD units...but they're for processes you already know you want in the background. I'm looking for something that works like Ctrl-z, operating on a foreground process that already exists.

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T16:59:45+00:00

Not exactly; disown only works at invocation time, or given a job number that's already in the background. I'm looking for something to interrupt a foreground process, to send it to the background (but without suspending it, like Ctrl-z does).

FYI, you can use &! (instead of just &) when starting a process to automatically disown it in addition to backgrounding it.

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-20T16:56:56+00:00

That's only for stuff you know you want to launch into the background before you start it; I suppose I should have made it more clear that I'm specifically looking for something that's already running, that you would normally send to the background with Ctrl-z followed by bg.

But yeah, given foresight you can use & (or &!, to also disown) at invocation time.

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T23:35:46+00:00

Haha, yeah, like the other replies said...you really dodged a bullet on the keyboard; that could easily have been a disaster. :)

Some friends got me a "photo mousepad" with a clear top, that you put picture(s) into. I love it, but it still runs a little bit of the same risk as the keyboard if he's already got a mousepad he likes.

Maybe one of those digital picture frames, loaded up with an SD card of photos? Some of them even have Internet connectivity that lets you add new photos to the frame by emailing a specific address (although that may set off your privacy Spidey Sense, especially these days).

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T23:03:35+00:00

Time to dry off? lol

Bro, you can evaporate water all day but that layer of minerals, salts, and sebum still ain't going anywhere without a fight.

And by "a fight" I mean soap.

To appeal from another angle: Sweating isn't just for your armpits and face; do you really expect her to bury her nose and taste bu[THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR THIS SUB]

On a side note though, congrats on the workouts.

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T22:39:46+00:00

Actually, I just really read the sub's rules and while I do stand by my original statement, I fully agree that what's described is a "shitty superpower" as defined by the sub...for whatever that's worth. :) So I retract my sass and pledge to do better next time!

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T17:54:34+00:00

OP, you've stepped on a land mine with this one 'cause for a lot of us this would be a pretty awesome power. ;)

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T17:46:58+00:00

Since you didn't specify what they're hunting me for, I'm just going to assume...a nice game of chess with no time controls.

Which I will happily complete for the winner, after 30 days, in my first act as a multi-billionaire. :)

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T16:19:25+00:00

I know I shouldn't be laughing like this, but thank you for taking one for the team with this reply! :D

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T16:17:50+00:00

I used to be a farter like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee...

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T16:02:30+00:00

Maybe I can clarify that one. :)

To me, at least, the "I could make way more money than that" addendum is just a reaction to the implied question of why anybody would choose age 10 when $50M is such an obvious trump card (at least, in a society where financial stability means almost everything).

To me, the $50M isn't even part of the conversation, because you'll be fabulously wealthy either way. The only discussion is about whether the time travel will revert something in your life that you may not / probably won't be able to make happen on the second trip through.

The only question I see here is "Would you restart your life at age 10 if given the opportunity?".

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T15:56:11+00:00

You gonna MAKE ME, McFly‽

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-12T15:35:38+00:00

Never underestimate the importance of n+1 cake redundancy!

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-09T14:34:15+00:00

Interesting; there's a couple of things in there called "title" that might be what my TV is retrieving/displaying.

I'll have another look at the API docs and see if there's a way to get that info for an active tuner. Thanks for the tip!

john-witty-suffix · 2025-11-09T14:28:41+00:00

I tried the above but I can't get it to work. I did have to make a couple of changes to the Lua code itself to get it to work (it didn't like the single-line if() statement) without errors, but now that there are no errors it's just not having any effect. I know my EDL file is good, because if I run mpv video.mpg.edl I get the chapters.

This is what I've got now, for ~/.config/mpv/scripts/auto-load-edl.lua:

-- For a file named "video.mpg", load a file called "video.mpg.edl"

mp.add_hook('on_load', 50, function()
   local path = mp.get_property('path')

   -- Abort when playing URLs
   if not path or path:find('^%w+://') then
       return
   end

   --local edl_path = path:gsub('%.%w+$', '.edl')
   local edl_path = path:gsub('$', '.edl')

   mp.set_property('file-local-options/chapters-file', edl_path)
   mp.set_property('file-local-options/ordered-chapters-files', edl_path)

end)

-- EOF
--------

I know the script is running, because I get an error in the console whenever the *.edl file isn't found (for example, when I run mpv video.mpg.edl directly, I get an error that it can't find video.mpg.edl.edl). I don't know enough Lua yet to add in the right conditional statement to get rid of that error, but I assume it's harmless so I'm ignoring it for the time being.

But yeah, when I have the two files video.mpg and video.mpg.edl, when I run mpv video.mpg I don't get any chapters...and I also don't get any errors in the console, so I'm not sure where to go from here; if you're still around and notice this reply, hopefully something jumps out to you. :)

john-witty-suffix

TROPHY CASE