Sunday, May 31, 2020

Dual Booting with EFI, The Joy of

For several years I've purchased my laptops from System 76. They're good, and I'm on my third laptop. Many moons ago I needed a hardware swap-out while I was on a 2-week R&R from an Iraq deployment, and they hooked me right up. (I also live 30 minutes from where their HQ was at the time.) I learned the hard way that I needed Windows to control the booting of Windows and Linux (usually SUSE), or Windows patches would never work quite right.

EFI is great. I'd not realized that you dual-boot with the EFI bootloader, not with EasyBCD, boot.ini files, or the other stuff I'd used over the years. I did have to delete some fonts to clear out a little space in the /boot/efi partition, but worse things happen at sea, you know. I'm really pleased how easy it was. Hit ESC when booting and one-time boot your OS. Beautiful.

Lethality: The Podcast

I recorded two podcasts while at the U.S. Army War College. The second was on Lethality. In DoD terms, lethality means "good." It's the new hotness--all the rage. As an artilleryman, I approve.

But there's another side to these things. I've also studied a lot of economics, and it may just be easier to lose the peace as to lose the war. In that vein, I offer There's More to Life than Lethality. (Though the Space Force #pewpew article was more fun.)