Bought an Asus ROG desktop with a plan to use it as a development workstation and a gaming computer. Potential reboots between the two OSes were solved by placing Debian inside a virtual machine, with half of total RAM and host CPUs

After some time, we (me, myself and moi) unanimously agreed that Alt-tabbing was not practical in this scenario so 2 worlds needed to be fully separated

Q: What is my purpose?

A: You are a development workstation

Strangely enough, it turned out that dual booting G20AJ is not that easy

Debian netinst or any fully fledged installation with DE wouldn’t boot. Mint behaved the same (both LMDE2 and Sonya), alongside Fedora, {,K}Ubuntu and even PCLinuxOS (‘member finest GPU support? … I ‘member)

Irrelevant of the image preparation method (burning onto a CD or writting to a USB in a few different ways, just to be sure), display always went blank. Welcome screen was indeed visible, but after choosing any of the boot options – Elsa emerged

2^6 different UEFI configurations were tested, HDMI cable magic was exercised and even the sturdy VGA HD-15 tried it’s luck. All options were tried out – fallbacks, “safe boots”, forced CPU gfx, realloc, noacpi, n{vidia,ouveau}.modeset, the catch-all nomodeset…

After everything failed and reading the cries from users in similar situation came to a grinding halt, it was obvious that an alternative there-is-a-way-I-told-you-so solution needs to come forth – let’s install a server distribution and migrate away from it!

Brave New World

Man with no Linux choose Ubuntu Server as a host for future abandonment

Installation was simple, “framebuffer safe”, and login prompt quickly appeared. For a few minutes, at least, before being completely overwritten with Sid

In order to migrate from this temporary distro to a Debian Testing one needs to update sources.list

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

Public key needs to be imported, so that new packages can be fetched; and plain dist-upgrade fails with package inconsistencies, so here is the long list of commands needed to summon a new Debian

gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key 7638D0442B90D010
gpg -a --export 7638D0442B90D010 | apt-key add -
apt-get dist-upgrade -f
apt-get autoremove

Reboot and enjoy

There is always a way, even if it takes 3 days of hair.pull()

root@phoenix-person:~# lshw | grep ASUS -B 1 \
> | sed 's/ //g' | awk -F"(" '{print $1}' | sort -n | uniq
--
product:G20AJ
vendor:ASUSTeKCOMPUTERINC.
root@phoenix-person:~# cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux buster/sid \n \l