Last Tuesday, loads of Linux users—many running packages released as early as this year—started reporting their devices were failing to boot. Instead, they received a cryptic error message that included the phrase: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”
The cause: an update Microsoft issued as part of its monthly patch release. It was intended to close a 2-year-old vulnerability in GRUB, an open source boot loader used to start up many Linux devices. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, made it possible for hackers to bypass secure boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices running Windows or other operating systems don’t load malicious firmware or software during the bootup process. CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.
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The reports indicate that multiple distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Puppy Linux, are all affected. Microsoft has yet to acknowledge the error publicly, explain how it wasn’t detected during testing, or provide technical guidance to those affected. Company representatives didn’t respond to an email seeking answers.
Y’all, help a dummy out. I dual boot windows and Fedora. I only keep windows around for a very few college classes that require for screenwriting software. I have not booted into windows in months. I have a screenwriting class coming up in a week.
How worried should I be? I am not great with computers, I run fedora mostly because I support the philosophy of Linux, less for the techy stuff. Please advice, Linux people. I’m scurred.
When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.
Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.
I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.
Does that screenwriting software require a lot of performance? You might opt to install Windows into a virtual machine, as described here: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-setup-windows-10-virtual-machine-linux
Essentially you’re using some software to emulate a computer inside your computer that can run any operating system you want. It doesn’t need to touch your actual operating system installation, you can treat it as just another program. For your use case that sounds appropriate; you occasionally need to run specific software that has low system requirements. This way you can do that without risking Microsoft borking your Linux machine any time it feels like it.
I’d imagine it requires about as much as a word processor, since that’s basically what it is. A word processor with a specialized template and some nifty autofill options. Again, dummy here. If I’m running a virtual machine, can I create a file in it that is saved to my actual machine, or would I need to, like, email it to myself using the virtual windows os?
The latter thing you mentioned would work, but you can set up some shared storage between the VM and your machine. Here is some more info: https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-create-virtualbox-shared-folder-access/
This describes a Windows host and a Linux VM, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out the other way around. :)
Does your device have 16gb of ram? If so install Windows in Virtual manager with the guest addons. It will allow copy and paste along with lots of other features while keeping Windows in its own area.
It was 8 gigs. Someone else suggested boxes over a VM, would 8 gigs be enough for either of those?
No, 8 GB is not enough for virtualization of Windows guests
Out of curiosity, have you tried Fade In?
I looked into it, but I can’t afford it out of pocket. The school pays for final draft, but won’t cover anything else :/ If I could, that would definitely be my go-to
It’s free tho? Except for some minor limitations:
“The free downloadable demonstration version of Fade In includes all key functionality except for online realtime collaboration, and will place a watermark on any printed/PDF output.”
And there are ways around those
Can you install windows in a VM instead? VirtualBox is easy to set up.
Don’t use Virtualbox as native libvirt will be faster and doesn’t involve any licensing.
Depends if you care more about performance or ease of use. Based on the fact that OP hadn’t considered VM as a solution, I assume they aren’t super familiar with hypervisors.
Virtualbox is a pain. Virtual manager is much easier and natively supported. You just click new and then follow the wizard
That’s not at all the case in my experience. Sure virtual box modules can be harder to install, but libvirt has so many issues that the average user has no idea about. I’ve had networking issues, display issues, and so on. At one point it read the display scaling information and scaled down the VM display instead of scaling it up. Furthermore RedHat don’t even support virt manager anymore. They want you to use Cockpit. Honestly the all around best virtualization solution is probably VMWare or something like Gnome boxes or QuickEmu.
I would of agreed with you historically but these days I say libvirtd all the way.