Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.10 dual boot issue

I recently bought a HP Envy dv4 laptop for work. It came with Windows 8, and I wanted to install Ubuntu 12.10 Server on it. Here is the problems I ran into and how they were solved:

1. Internal CDROM install did not work correctly. First I thought it was because the CDROM was broken. Later on I found out that legacy BIOS support is not enabled in the UEFI. Once Legacy support is enabled in UEFI, installing from CDROM worked fine.

2. Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit did not detect that the system is using UEFI and installed GRUB-PC(which is for the old BIOS/MBR) instead. So after installation the system booted straight into Windows 8 with no  option to boot into Linux.

3. I downloaded the Boot Repair and ran it. It uninstalled the grub-pc and installed grub-efi but at the end it stated that error occurred and suggested that I move the Linux into the first partition. This was not an easy option for me. So the system still cannot boot into Linux.

4. What saved the day was the tool called "rEFInd" found in  This Post . The actual website is located at HERE. A great piece of software with clear instructions. So I booted into Windows 8 and followed the instruction listed under "

Installing rEFInd Manually Using Windows"

5. It worked great!! Later on I used the "bcdedit" command to set the boot manager to grubx64 directly and it worked as well.

Thanks Rod!

Lenovo thinkpad technical details of different models

Thinkpad http://www.lenovo.com/psref/

How to Tell if Your CPU supports Virtulization Technology on Linux

It’s quite simple: We’ll need to take a peek inside the /proc/cpuinfo file and look at the flags section for one of two values, vmx or svm.

• vmx – (intel)
• svm – (amd)

You can use grep to quickly see if either value exists in the file by running the following command:

egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo

If your system supports VT, then you’ll see vmx or svm in the list of flags. My system has two processors, so there are two separate sections:

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm

VT technology can still be disabled in your computer’s BIOS, however, so you’ll want to check there to make sure that it hasn’t been disabled. The flags in cpuinfo simply mean that your processor supports it.


Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-processor-supports-vt/

vmware and virtualbox usb device in use not able to attach to VM

If you have a USB device that cannot be detached from the HOST and attach to your VM, one possible reason is because you are using USB 3.0 port the device. Change to a USB 2.0 port should help in that case. This was my case with Windows 7 running on Thinkpad T530.