Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

[diif]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

Apparently Windows 10 has two levels of drive encryption. This laptop has "device encryption" turned on (but not fully set up because I'm not using a Microsoft account), but BitLocker is off.

Yes, there are two, it seems you currently aren't using any though.

Device encryption is available on all versions of Windows, signing in with a Microsoft account means your key is uploaded automatically to your one drive.

Bitlocker is only on the Pro, Enterprise and Education version of windows, it allows for various configurations with the key being able to be stored in Active Directory, or printed out.

[TechGeek]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

Apparently Windows 10 has two levels of drive encryption. This laptop has "device encryption" turned on (but not fully set up because I'm not using a Microsoft account), but BitLocker is off.

Now I'm wondering if I should actually dual-boot one of my computers so I can start looking at the video capture stuff again. Maybe I need to learn how to write my own capture software since I haven't been able to get both video and audio captured properly at the same time. I've tried asking around, and all I get is screen recorders (which can't capture video from any capture cards at all) or software that only works with UVC devices (like webcams). OBS can capture video, but the audio is broken. I can also record audio using Audacity, and it comes out just as good as Windows.

As far as video capture goes, use *nix. You'll need to use v4l2-ctl to control the capture hardware (mainly setting the input after booting up), but anything past that is just catting /dev/video0 to a file, and then post-processing.

[lti]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

Yes, there are two, it seems you currently aren't using any though.

I never set up either, but there's still a "Turn off" button for device encryption.

As far as video capture goes, use *nix. You'll need to use v4l2-ctl to control the capture hardware (mainly setting the input after booting up), but anything past that is just catting /dev/video0 to a file, and then post-processing.

I do have to use v4l2-ctl to unmute the audio before recording. I never tried to cat /dev/video0 somewhere, but considering that I was capturing full 6-hour EP mode T120 tapes for a while, having some kind of compression (a lossless codec like FFV1 or huffyuv) would be nice. I've already filled my 1TB SSD a few times.

[TechGeek]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

You'll have to capture from /dev/video0 and run that through a re-encoder that can run at real-time, then. If the system can't keep up with that, then you'll have to run batches of videos through post-processing.

[lti]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

It's only 720x480 (interlaced), so even the horrible i3-2330M in that Toshiba laptop could handle it. The problem with it was that something related to USB degraded, so it couldn't sustain the bandwidth required to capture video (no problems with high CPU or disk activity, and even copying files to an external hard drive only went at 15MB/s).

The FFmpeg documentation says it can take /dev/video0 as an input source and encode to FFV1 or HuffYUV, but having a GUI would be nice. If I capture in higher resolutions, I can also encode with Quick Sync or NVENC with the right Linux graphics drivers (I obviously won't be capturing lossless 1080p 60fps video with 1TB of storage).

[lti]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

FFmpeg does capture, but the audio is about 1.5 seconds out of sync. Maybe I shouldn't use a PulseAudio source for the audio (/dev/video0 does not contain audio - the audio on the capture device shows up as a line-in, but with an extra mute control only accessible through v4lctl). Quality seems reasonable so far, but it seems like the video is offset vertically (three of the data lines are visible at the top).

I should start a separate thread for the video capture stuff. It has been spread across multiple threads.

[lti]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

I finally turned device encryption off, and now Linux can access the drive. Decrypting the drive within fully booted Windows was a little scary, but I have backups (and didn't need them). I still don't know why it would be turned on without a Microsoft account.

As I mentioned in another thread, I'm getting a lot more interested in Linux with how broken Microsoft software is becoming, but I still don't think I can switch over entirely due to software support.

[petehall347]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

I finally turned device encryption off, and now Linux can access the drive. Decrypting the drive within fully booted Windows was a little scary, but I have backups (and didn't need them). I still don't know why it would be turned on without a Microsoft account.

As I mentioned in another thread, I'm getting a lot more interested in Linux with how broken Microsoft software is becoming, but I still don't think I can switch over entirely due to software support.

its easy to dual boot and choose at startup .. when i first went to linux ubuntu i did a virus scan of the hard drive when booted into ubuntu .it told me windows was a virus so i deleted it ..its actually true believe it or not .

[lti]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

I was dual-booting the Toshiba laptop I had. I don't remember which OS I used the most, but Windows was unusable for web browsing due to a lack of RAM. I was also getting higher CPU usage under Windows while watching video (before I ran out of RAM), even though I didn't have the right drivers to use hardware video decoding under Linux.

I still haven't committed to installing Linux on one of my good computers yet (or even choosing a distro). I've been installing Linux on shitty computers, but anything decent is running Windows only.

[Topcat]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

Yes, there are two, it seems you currently aren't using any though.

Device encryption is available on all versions of Windows, signing in with a Microsoft account means your key is uploaded automatically to your one drive.

Bitlocker is only on the Pro, Enterprise and Education version of windows, it allows for various configurations with the key being able to be stored in Active Directory, or printed out.

Interesting. I have been trying to upgrade a laptop with 10 Pro (21h2) for a guy; bitlocker is off....however when I attempt to clone the drive, it says it encrypted with bitlocker and can not be read/cloned. How does one kill this 'other level'? Never encountered it before.

[diif]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

Interesting. I have been trying to upgrade a laptop with 10 Pro (21h2) for a guy; bitlocker is off....however when I attempt to clone the drive, it says it encrypted with bitlocker and can not be read/cloned. How does one kill this 'other level'? Never encountered it before.

Interesting, Schrodinger's encryption.
It would be helpful to know where it's saying it's enabled/disabled but maybe you need to be Administrator. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...intel-nuc.html

[lti]

Re: Linux penguin -- Best, comment, rage.

Interesting. I have been trying to upgrade a laptop with 10 Pro (21h2) for a guy; bitlocker is off....however when I attempt to clone the drive, it says it encrypted with bitlocker and can not be read/cloned. How does one kill this 'other level'? Never encountered it before.

Settings > Update & Security > Device encryption

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...f-7925c2a3012d

That Microsoft article is mostly about BitLocker, but it does mention device encryption at the bottom. On my computer, the "Device encryption" tab disappeared after decryption finished because I'm using a local account. The scary part is that decryption happens within full Windows with Windows claiming that you can keep using the computer while it decrypts.

[lti]

I found this thread again while I was looking for something else, and I was already thinking of installing Linux on my main computer. Then I noticed the number of bad blocks on my SSD climbing, so I got a new SSD and installed Linux. I used MX Linux, and it feels a little flaky. I've already seen random background stuff segfault (only visible when I was looking through dmesg for something unrelated). Unfortunately, Linux Mint ran poorly (at least when booted from random cheap flash drives - I didn't try installing it). Video was really choppy, even when simply moving windows around. I checked the graphics driver, and it's using modesetting, which is apparently correct for modern Intel integrated graphics.

I have noticed that my old 512MB flash drive won't mount. It appears as /dev/sdb, but it doesn't present itself in the file manager. When I try to mount it manually, I get NTFS errors, even though it's FAT16 (I thought it was FAT32 for all these years, but Windows confirmed).

NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

For the video capture, apparently gstreamer will help, but I haven't gone through the whole command line procedure to capture video. I got a really cheap ($30) UVC capture dongle (and video quality matches the price - severely oversharpened, but at least it's real USB 3), and then I learned that guvcview writes corrupt audio streams. I tried the MP2 and AAC options, and the default MP2 worked the best. It was at least playable in Celluloid and could be edited with Kdenlive, but Kdenlive doesn't display the audio level (the audio track in the timeline is just an empty green rectangle). VLC crashes instantly when I open either file, but VLC has always given me problems. Then I unplugged the capture dongle, plugged it back in a couple hours later to try something else, and wireplumber crashed, requiring a restart to get sound back (and to get video files to play - I was watching a YouTube video when it crashed, and the video immediately stopped with the buffering indicator).

It also looks like the CPU usage is higher when playing YouTube, even though it appears to be using hardware video decoding. That's the opposite of that Toshiba laptop, but I think that Intel never made a functional Windows driver for Sandy Bridge integrated graphics (disabling hardware video decoding in Windows reduced GPU usage, but CPU usage stayed exactly the same).

In short, Linux feels unfinished to me, but using Windows 10 or 11 feels like you're in an abusive relationship while living in an HOA neighborhood. I don't like the direction Microsoft is going with every one of their products, so I still want to look for an alternative before the big "oh shit" moment. Maybe most of these are distro problems.

[lti]

I've confirmed that the flash drive works in Lubuntu and Mint. Between that and the weird instability, I see why MX Linux has so few users.

I feel like going back to Windows temporarily (by cloning the failing SSD onto the new one) until I figure out what's wrong with Mint (or just use Lubuntu, even though this computer doesn't need a lightweight distro). Also, I forgot about the rest of the video software that I use. I need to find something to replace Avisynth and VirtualDub. I do too much stuff on this computer.

As long as I still have time to edit, I will add that I've been running Linux on web browsing machines around here for years now. They've mostly run Lubuntu, but I also ran Puppy Linux and Tiny Core on some. They've all become "retro gaming" systems (running old versions of Windows instead) except the Toshiba laptop.

[stj]

why dont people dual-boot by just adding a second (3rd? drive) and enabling the boot menu in the bios?
windows will only run from the primary drive, but Linux doesnt give a fuck and will run from any drive.

[lti]

I did that (by putting the original failing SSD in the second M.2 slot for Windows and installing Linux on the new drive). It's just that I picked a bad distro. I'm in Windows now on the second drive (or third since I also have an 8TB HDD), but since that old SSD is still counting up bad blocks, I'm going to put Windows back on the new SSD and buy a cheap new one for Linux (and probably go back to Lubuntu, even though this computer doesn't need a lightweight distro).

Also, Gigabyte sucks at BIOSes, so installing two NVMe drives makes the video error LED light up after the OS has successfully booted (with working video). That's no big deal since it still works anyway, and even if it didn't work, I'm fine with SATA SSDs.

In the old days (before Windows 10), you could put both operating systems on the same drive. That's what I did on that Toshiba laptop (Windows 7 and Lubuntu on the same drive). Now Windows will wipe out GRUB and reinstall the standard Windows bootloader. I thought they did it to be dicks, but considering how bad OneDrive and Teams are (and the bugs have existed for years with no sign of ever getting resolved), I think Microsoft is dealing with unprecedented incompetence.

[stj]

i recomend people use what i call "base" distro's not derivatives.
you get bigger package selections and faster updates.
most major dristro's are based on Debian unbuntu being the biggest debian based disro,
or redhat/centos

i wouldnt trust redhat for the same reason i wouldnt trust anything from australia - government intrusiveness - aka spyware/backdoors
not saying redhat is compromised, but if the doj turned up at their door with an order to insert code into stuff, they would face prison if they said no or told anybody it even happened.
thats why ProtonMail shut down, they showed up there insisting on access and keys - instead of saying yes or going to prison the owner just shut it down and told them to GTFO!

[TechGeek]

I did that (by putting the original failing SSD in the second M.2 slot for Windows and installing Linux on the new drive). It's just that I picked a bad distro. I'm in Windows now on the second drive (or third since I also have an 8TB HDD), but since that old SSD is still counting up bad blocks, I'm going to put Windows back on the new SSD and buy a cheap new one for Linux (and probably go back to Lubuntu, even though this computer doesn't need a lightweight distro).

Also, Gigabyte sucks at BIOSes, so installing two NVMe drives makes the video error LED light up after the OS has successfully booted (with working video). That's no big deal since it still works anyway, and even if it didn't work, I'm fine with SATA SSDs.

In the old days (before Windows 10), you could put both operating systems on the same drive. That's what I did on that Toshiba laptop (Windows 7 and Lubuntu on the same drive). Now Windows will wipe out GRUB and reinstall the standard Windows bootloader. I thought they did it to be dicks, but considering how bad OneDrive and Teams are (and the bugs have existed for years with no sign of ever getting resolved), I think Microsoft is dealing with unprecedented incompetence.

Sounds like that failing SSD is munching the install alive. Stop using that SSD and put something else in. You might consider also running MemTest86+ against the system, as faulty memory will cause all sorts of unexplainable behavior and corrupt files left and right.

[lti]

I had Linux installed on the new drive (the failing one still had Windows on it), and only one distro showed any problems. Mint and Lubuntu were fine, and booting Windows off the failing drive was also fine.

[stj]

about the windows problem.
maybe the encryption is enabled without a key,
so the data is unencrypted but all the headers and flags say it's encrypted!