Blogging from a plane…

What a time to be alive! I’m on a flight to Bali at the moment and on the line! The 20 MB limit is not all that great, but enough for my needs.

This trip hasn’t been without incident though. For starters, my Windows installation is not booting all of a sudden. Haven’t really had enough time to figure out what’s happening between checking in and running to the gates… The boot process was taking a while – possibly the result of throttling when on battery power. Windows machines seem to be notorious for throttling on battery – Mac OS X doesn’t have that problem.

The laptop I’m using is the Acer Aspire S5 with 8 GB memory and a core i5 6200U processor. I have 3 OSes installed – Windows 10 on the biggest partition and Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (booted into this now) and Fedora 28 on 2 smaller partitions. This setup works well for me, I may end up wiping the Fedora partition as I don’t use it much – I boot into it to update it basically.

To get the tri-booting setup working was tricky – Acer seems to have hard-wired the Windows EFI boot directory into the boot process so I have to overwrite the Windows EFI file with a custom file with all 3 OSes. That’s complicated by that the partition is only 100MB and every big Windows update re-writes the file! I created a simple bash script that I run after every big Windows update that:

  1. mounts the EFI partition
  2. deletes the unnecessary language files (so my custom files fit)
  3. copies my custom boot file
  4. backs up the new Windows boot file – just in case.

It’s a long story, I’ll post the details and the script sometime.

Any way, hopefully this post can be published while I’m in the air – I’ll punctuate it with links etc. when I have a better internet connection.

Update: Published mid-air!

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