The masochistic joy of Windows

19 Dec 2023 on Technology

I bought a framework laptop, pre-built Windows; it needs stickers now.

I recently purchased a framework laptop; the Framework 13 13th Gen Intel variant. I have no complaints about the hardware, and I’m loving the hardware switch for the webcam & microphone. I have yet to find any niggles with it (though I have only had it for ~1 week). This acts as documentation for my setup to dual boot Windows (on NVMe) and Ubuntu (on 1Tb expansion).

It takes a certain type of masochism to use Windows as your primary driver if you’re hard-trained as a Unix developer by choice (I had a SCO x86 install back in the day, and probably grew my developer chops on HP-UX). I find Macs get more in the way than Windows (mostly the keyboard), and I have every intention on dual booting this way to see if I can live without MS Outlook (it’s a fucking low bar to hurdle, but I don’t feel that there’s anything out there that’s close).

There are choices here to auto-provision laptops if you’re an organisational entity; most of those choices don’t seem fit into the world where you only might need to use it every 3 years. A lot of this is because I’ve chosen not to sync some of these settings online; that is an explicit choice that I’ve made, because I know they’ll get it wrong and annoy me even more.

Post Windows install

I realise that I might be able to do something with Desired State Configuration but really?, really really?

That’s the obligatory reference to XKCD done; with the framework laptop I hope to be able to extend out past 3 years by being able to replace the mainboard / battery etc. as needs be for longevity. It’s taken ~1 day for the manual windows nonsense, which equates to lets say ~2hours per year.

• Remove all the shitty default programs that don’t interest me (Solitaire Connection anyone?) that seem to keep coming back from time to time; I’m pretty sure that I could probably group policy this out of existence but I never wanted to be a Windows admin.
• Install Microsoft Office and try and make it use my O365 account rather than my MS personal account (there’s a bunch of reasons why I have 2 accounts).
  • Microsoft is saving my outlook settings “online”; it doesn’t seem to do much with toolbar customisations so I have to revisit and remove all the “share with teams/ skype for business” bullshit.
  • What fun there is to be had with Office TeachingCallouts.
• Installing WSL2 and doing the WSL shutdown cycle because you have to edit C:/users/.../.wslconfig & /etc/wsl.conf in WSL2
• (Create your Ubuntu installer); I have a USB-A expansion card, so I just did something with Rufus.

Get ready to dual boot

• Turn off bitlocker (make sure you know what your recovery key is)
• Shrink the Windows partition by 100Mb

Arguably if you’re going to disable bitlocker then you can just install Ubuntu alongside the Windows Boot Manager and everything will be fine anyway; I’m doing it like this to keep things nice and separate.

Installing Ubuntu

• F12 to get the boot menu, and boot using USB key.
• Start installing Ubuntu, but at the point of Type of Installation; we’re Something Else so we get some manual partitioning fun.
  • Create a 100Mb System EFI partition in the free space on the NVMe drive
  • Use as much or as little of the expansion card for Linux (524288Mb for me) mounted as /.
  • Change the boot loader to live on nvme0n1p5 (or whatever the new partition is called)
• Install/Update/Reboot dance until Ubuntu is happy
  • By now I will have done a sudo update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.basic and a visudo NOPASSWD:ALL
  • sudo echo "GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768" >> /etc/default/grub to force the resolution of the GRUB menu.
  • (sudo echo "GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES="part_gpt part_msdos"" >> /etc/default/grub) since I was investigating stuff, this didn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt since you can see they’re loaded anyway.
  • sudo update-grub
• Reboot and enter Windows, at which point you may need to type in your bitlocker key (this does depend on the route you took to enter the Windows bootloader; if it was GRUB then you’ll need to type it in, if it was the Windows Boot Manager then you probably won’t).

The generic post install parts.

Most of these steps are OS agnostic other than scoop; most of it is scripted with some input required.

• Web browsers with the password managers (including the firefox mozilla sync cycle).
  • Logging into github and making sure that cookie auto-delete knows to whitelist it.
• Logging into github and generating a PAT for the machine…
• scoop import import.json
  • There are still manual ‘ungoogled-chromium’ shenanigans.
• Bootstrap the Ubuntu/WSL2 dev tooling (which is why I now have ubuntu-dpm)
• Creating a new GPG key and configuring gopass
• sdkman | nvm | rvm | pyenv

Summary

The end result is a dual boot that is working OK with a single issue. In either OS, the laptop is performing nicely.

• A reboot from Windows results in the GRUB shell; exit resulting in another reboot restores GRUB’s normal operation.
• A shutdown from Windows and power-on is a normal GRUB event.
• A reboot from Ubuntu is (as you expect) fine.

This is apparently because post Windows reboot the framework expansion card is missing. On a power-on boot we have (hd0,msdos5) && (hd1,gpt5) as valid partitions to boot from. On a Windows 11 reboot we only have (hd0,gpt5)¹. I’m going to be scratching this itch pretty hard but my interim workaround is to

• Change new boot priority in the BIOS to be first rather than auto
• Make Windows first
• Change the timeout on to be 5 seconds

This means I have 5 seconds to press F12 and get into the boot menu.

1. This suggests that Windows had disavowed all knowledge of the expansion card… ↩︎