What better way to spend an 11 degree morning here in Charm City, than building a Linux machine on top of a Windows 11 machine. And doing it in such a way as I can use both operating systems without messing with a dual boot loader.

Last year I bought an LG Gram 17” laptop at Costco, when I saw one there at a good price. I was a few months into my part time return to the Institute, and while I liked the Macbook Pro they gave me to use (very nice, very powerful, Very Expensive), I felt I also needed a Windows machine too so I could use some of the Microsoft development tools I’d used there before. Before I retired I had both Windows and Mac laptops on my desk, side by side and used them both. Being that the Gram was my personal machine I could only connect it to the Guest network at the office, but that was okay for my purposes.

Over time I came to really like that LG Gram. It is thin, lightweight, has a very impressive battery life, and a really Really nice display. I came to despise Windows 11.

So I started wondering about making the Gram a Linux machine instead. Initial reports I saw were that it was difficult to impossible to do on a Gram because it had secure boot software in the bios that had to be worked around. (and why would you need to use anything besides Microsoft’s excellent operating system citizen?) But more recent posts had step by step instructions, and users who said the Gram was a pure delight to run Linux on, once you got it working.

Problem was, I occasionally needed a Windows machine at home and I didn’t want to have to buy another laptop just for that one purpose. An older Dell I had that was once a Windows 10 box began having hardware failures, fan won’t run, won’t charge its battery anymore, and I just need to take it to recycling. The Gram is the only Windows machine I have left. I ruled out dual booting Windows and Linux on the same machine from previous bad experiences with dual boot managers, plus all the work arounds I saw were needed to get dual boot to run on the Gram around secure boot. But I kept thinking about it. Digging into it more I saw that I could possibly create a bootable Linux drive on a USB stick, then when I wanted Linux I could plug that stick in, boot the Gram, hit F10 and select the stick as the boot drive, or just leave the drive unplugged and boot when I needed Windows.

I went about it badly at first. I ordered a 125 gig USB stick and wrote the SuSE Leap 15.6 Linux installer onto it, thinking that I could just tell it to partition the rest of the stick as the bootable Linux drive. But no. When the installer tried to write the boot partition information it could not, because the installer media had that partition locked down. So the first try failed.

I had another, smaller USB stick I’d brought back with all my files from my California adventure. I offloaded those to my NAS and then wrote the SuSE Leap installer to that stick. Now the plan was to boot from the smaller stick and tell the installer to put Linux on the bigger one, theoretically overwriting the SuSE installation media I had on it during partitioning. But both sticks came from the same vendor, Lexar, so when I hit F10 during boot they both displayed on the boot menu with the same drive name and I couldn’t tell which from which.

I took out the big stick, booted from the smaller stick, and when its installer was coming up put the big stick back in, hoping it would still detect it. It did. So now I put the plan into motion. I told the installer to use sdc and ignore sda and sdb. The Gram came partitioned with two 1tb logical drives on the SSD. I could see in the partition manager that came up that sdc was the large stick. I didn’t bother trying to partition sdc because I thought the installer would do that and get rid of everything that was there previously. That was a mistake.

The installation went along until it came to the point of writing out the boot manager, at which point it failed again. When it tried to write into it I saw an out of disk space error, that was probably just no I’m not letting you write a new boot entry here.

So I had to repartition the other stick to get the SuSE installer off it. I made that entire stick one big empty partition formatted as a Linux file system. Then I tried again.

This time it worked. The installer ran to completion without a problem, and the Gram rebooted into SuSE Leap 15.6. I was able to log in and poke around for a bit, shut down, remove the stick, start up and the Gram booted into Windows 11 as usual.

I haven’t set it up fully yet, but now I can boot into SuSE Leap 15.6 on the Gram with no trouble, just by plugging in that USB stick, hitting F10 when the Gram boots, and selecting that stick to boot into. When I need Windows I can just leave the stick out and let the Gram boot as usual.

This is good. The Gram will make an Excellent Linux travel machine. It is lightweight, has a lot of battery time, and a very nice large screen.