I took the plunge. First, I had an Arch Linux install in a virtual machine on my work laptop, running Windows 7. I just made the Window full screen. It didn’t feel like the real thing, and I missed a lot of the slickness a bare metal operating system gives you in the sense of performance. I would also like to be able to run VM’s under Linux and get some real Docker experience.
Then, I realized that when I received my laptop from my work, that the hardware was customized. One of the things they did next to the ram extension was an upgrade of the harddrive to an SSD. So where did they leave the original harddrive.
It was in the box I received on pickup. Spare drive, now what?
I went to (http://www.hddcaddy.eu)[HDD Caddy] and picked up a HDD Caddy for my HP Laptop. This device replaces my DVD drive. Since I never use a DVD drive anyways, I thought it would be better to install a drive here I would actually use.
DVD drive got popped out, HDD Caddy with a 500GB Toshiba disk got pushed in. My plan had some delay when my daughter was born on the first of June, but nevertheless I took an hour for myself and suddenly my laptop was dualbooting Windows 7 with Arch.
Although the installation itself was pretty painless, I need to get some stuff sorted out before we are ‘production ready’:
Wlan is the most urgent, as I like my rig to be mobile. Why would I use a laptop for this project otherwise. I’m a bit puzzled that WLan is still very much unsupported out of the box, but I will sort this and get it working quickly I recon.