August 12 2025 SystemRescue, EndeavourOS, Plasma 6, Uptime Kuma, Linux Mint
Darren brought in a laptop which he could only boot from a USB and ran SystemRescue to see if he could diagnose the problem. Entering
fsarchiver -v probe
listed the available partitions which he was then able to mount and explore. John commented that he particularly liked SystemRescue because, unlike some other software, it did not touch any of the existing system until you told it to.
As Darren already suspected, the problem lay with Grub or, as Steve pointed out, the ‘Grand Universal Bootloader’ which introduced chain-linking. So John suggested that he try Super Grub2 Disk. At this point there were various reminiscences of the LILO bootloader.
Darren then unmounted the partitions and shut SystemRescue down.
Steve demonstrated Ventoy which offers multi-boot for iso images and which he had installed on a 128Gb USB stick; he then selected EndeavourOS which comes with Plasma to demonstrate. He particularly likes the integration of the Dolphin file manager and Konsole terminal emulator in Plasma.
He also demonstrated Uptime Kuma which he uses to monitor the various programs on his Proxmox server along with a couple more features of his Proxmox server setup.
John said that he had been in touch with two people who might need help with Windows 10; one has a 2009 laptop which cannot run Windows 11. He says he does very little on it; so John is meeting him to discuss the possibility of installing Linux Mint on it instead. John plans to use SystemRescue, as he had done on previous migrations from Windows, to copy all the data files off the laptop, install Linux Mint and then copy the data files back.
Steve asked what desktop it has and John said that he had downloaded the Cinnamon desktop version, but Mate and Xfce are also available.
The other person has a 2012 laptop with theoretically enough RAM to run Windows 11 but which John expects may benefit from an increase in the available RAM even if Windows 11 installs satisfactorily.
Past Meetings