Linux Mint 20 Beta should be out soon for testing

[fox]

I would say not. But I now have another problem as a result of installing this. It installed grub in such a way that my MacOS partitions are not showing, even when I boot into a MacOS recovery partition. This has never happened before. And strangely enough, it isnââ,¬â,,¢t seeing my Ubuntu installation on the internal SSD. Iââ,¬â,,¢m working on fixing this now.

[fox]

This turned out to be a serious problem. For whatever reason, the Mint installer messed up the Apple APFS volumes so badly that they were unreadable by anything. Normally when you boot a Mac with the option key down, it shows all the bootable volumes, but these were not visible. Fortunately, I have a backup of MacOSX on a Samsung T5 external SSD. This could be booted, but it was also unable to recognized the APFS partitions and it could not repair them. They had to be reformatted, and I'm now cloning the T5 MacOS partition.

The other MacOSX partition was on an external thunderbolt drive, the one holding Mint 19.3. Gparted sees that partition as APFS, but it can't do anything with it. And the T5 MacOS drive doesn't see it at all, nor does Apple's Disk Utility. So when I'm done cloning the Mac partition from the T5, I'll have to erase the thunderbolt Mac partition and reformat it before cloning onto it.

Big pain in the butt. I've have never had anything like this happen before when installing a distro. A good warning for beta testers!

[Jason]

I could see that grub could prevent you from booting to other OSes or prevent you from booting at all if the configuration is setup badly but it shouldn't touch the file system unless it put itself on that file system. Where did you install the boot loader?

[fox]

I took the default installation, so I'm not sure where it put it. This is a mystery to me as well. Even if grub was set up badly, it was in such a way as to prevent MacOS from seeing that there was a Mac operating system there. And in two partitions, only one being the disk it was installed on.

[fox]

The good news is that if you have Mint 19 installed, you shouldn't have to install Mint 20 from scratch if you don't want to. Mint 19 will be upgradable.

[fox]

The bad news is that VirtualBox will not run on the 4.15 kernel; neither the current version (6.1) nor the previous version (5.2). Either one can be installed, but there must be something missing in the 4.15 kernel related to virtualbox. It will start up and it will allow you to set up a vm, but it won't run it. This means that unless I stick with the 19.3 version of Mint, I will have to run any vm with VMware Player.

By the way, I was unable to install two versions of VirtualBox at the same time on Mint 20. Perhaps one can if there is a .deb and a .flatpack version.

[buster]

These observations are not recommendations but simply my personal preferences.

!. I have no dual or triple boots anywhere on my 4 computers. Grub has broken my heart too many times in the past.
2. If I test anything, beta or stable, it's inside a virtual machine first before I let it touch a hard drive.

And this is a question: Why do you need a virtual machine inside this Mint? You, I believe, use a VM only to test distros, not to use them as tools as I do. Any working VM on any of your operating systems would do, wouldn't it?

By the way, I could feel your pain all the way up in the north end. I've grown to hate and fear that kind of stuff.

[fox]

I don't need a vm inside of Mint, but it has come in handy when I need access to Adobe Reader, or new versions of Excel, for work-related stuff. A lot less of that now, and I can always boot up the Mac side for either of these. But the real reason I tried to install VirtualBox is to test the Mint beta. It's good to test all of your applications from the older version so as to know what won't work if you upgrade.

[Jason]

Isn't there another machine you could test Linux Mint 20 beta on?

But if you're dead set on using Virtualbox on that machine, check out this page if you haven't already. There are downloads for different Ubuntu versions. With the older kernel, I'd suspect you want the one for Ubuntu 18.04 / 18.10 / 19.04. I imagine the different versions are for different kernels, not so much the OS.

[fox]

Yes, I could test it on another computer, but it would be this one that I would use it with.

I'm not dead set at all on using VirtualBox; VMware Player works fine. But I went to that web page and found that the version they are recommending for 18.04 is the same as the 20.04 version, which doesn't work. At least it doesn't on the 4.15 kernel version that is the latest one (4.15.0-106). I wonder if you need an HWE version?

[Jason]

But I went to that web page and found that the version they are recommending for 18.04 is the same as the 20.04 version, which doesn't work.

Look closer. The VirtualBox version number is the same but there are different .deb files. There is one for 18.04 / 18.10 /19.04 and one for 19.10 and 20.04. The first one should work for you as Linux Mint 19 worked, right? And it's based on 18.04 so it should use the same kernel series. Unless you already tried that.

[fox]

You were right; the numbers were the same except at the end. However, the result was the same. The error message indicated that the vbox kernel modules have to be signed. There is a procedure for doing this, but I'm not going to bother. If I need a vm, I'll use VMware.

[Jason]

VirtualBox used to work a lot better with less tinkering to get things working so I don't blame you. I just like it's snapshot ability but I think you have the Pro version of VMware Workstation so you'd have that ability, anyway.

Btw, just curious, do you have secure boot enabled on this computer? I did some quick probing and it looks like that error message about unsigned vbox modules might be from secure boot being enabled.

[fox]

I think you're right about secure boot. I didn't enable it on purpose on this Mac, but I think it's enabled automatically. Note that I don't get the VirtualBox error message when I boot from the 5.4 kernel. I may have read somewhere that the issue is the old kernel.

I don't have VMware Workstation; just the free VMware Workstation Player.

[Jason]

Note that I don't get the VirtualBox error message when I boot from the 5.4 kernel. I may have read somewhere that the issue is the old kernel.

I'm thinking that's probably because the vbox modules for the newer kernel are signed. Secure boot expects an OS, in this case a kernel, that it knows. And modules that are loaded at boot time can change what it expects and not allow you to boot. So VB is warning you of this (probably) so you don't end up with an unbootable system. But yeah, VMware is still easier.