Same problem. The time before, I was blocked by an error message, now it runs indefinitely on this screen.
I noticed something surprising: the last time I tested Bluefin, which is quite recent, on Fedora 41, it did not support Apple’s .mov, mp4, and probably .heic. There, everything works, including in Fedora 41. Is there something special that we can hope to find in the installed version?
I have another question: the fact that an os-prober type process is trying to start, does it mean that we are going to make a possibility of double boot installation?
I know. But I wondered if the live would change anything.
Theoretically, you can place a 2nd EFI partition (from memory, also a /boot partition in ext4, the BTRFS partition for the system and choose the system at the beginning by pressing the shortcut to select the disk.
Sorry but I don’t understand your comment about dual boot. Are you saying that Bluefin won’t coexist with another distro installed on the same PC? Does that mean that grub (and Refind) will be obsolete? Or are you saying that Bluefin won’t share a physical disk with another distro? That it must occupy the whole disk?
I’m not the least bit technical, just a Linux user for decades, and I usually have several distros installed on my computer. So I’m confused by your comment.
Bluefin has never supported dual booting off of the same disk, we cannot guarantee that another OS won’t stomp on your stuff. If you want to dual boot you must put Windows (or whatever other OS) on a seperate disk.
Wow. Okay, I guess Bluefin isn’t for me then. I often update files (user files that is, not system files) from other distros, it’s never been a problem. In my decades of having multiple distros installed on single disks I’ve never had any data loss, at least not that I can blame on a distro corrupting data outside its own. I’ve lost data but it’s always been because I’ve stuffed up as I basically don’t really know what I’m doing. But I’m just one user, so the sample size is not representative.
If it is a concern that another distro may corrupt Bluefin’s data (system or user), isn’t that still a concern given that another distro installed on another disk can still access the disk Bluefin is installed on?
Thanks for clarifying.
PS I don’t use Windows, and haven’t done since M$ stopped supporting Win7.
There are technical limitations with multiple partitions on the same disk (the doc I linked links to the fedora docs), and we also don’t support edge cases on purpose for support reasons, we’re here to simplify things.
It is NOT supported to run Blufin on the same disk inside “second” partition. You can run it just fine if you have additional disk.
I have had dual boot for many users too… but I have had problem all the way. Like dual boot with Windows, Windows does some update (and Windows expects to be the only OS on disk) and just breaks grub (or was it LILO that days) or Linux pushes some firmware and I am stuck with disk encryption. Dual boot is just trouble, because OS-es don’t test this enough or at all.
In my humble opinion test Blufin in virtual machine. This Blufin’s immutable / atomic thing is just something you can’t miss. I always install new OS in virtual machine, so I can always just delete virtual machine if I don’t like it… and using virtual machine snapshotting so I can always revert to previous state if I break something. And I do like to do some tests, to play around, that may break machine, but… because it is virtual machine I can revert back where I have been like 5 mins ago.
@mogplus8, don’t give up on Blufin.
Just don’t expect to ever be installed on the same disk as other OS-es.
As I said, there seems to be a way around this. And this is precisely the technique that had to be used on Mac to circumvent the impossibility of installing Grub at startup.
Make a second EFI partition behind the previous system (but Windows sticks a partition at the end of the disk, which may complicates the matter). This second partition is therefore in FAT32, like the first. We then add a /boot partition behind this partition, then the rest in root partition in BTRFS (apparently, we can’t save the /boot). Instead of booting from Grub, the system must be selected with the option of choosing the boot disk, as in the case of a second disk.
@mogplus8 Just because Bluefin doesn’t support it doesn’t mean it cannot be made to work. I personally triple boot Windows, Bluefin, and NixOS all from the same disk. Heck, Bluefin and NixOS even share the same btrfs filesystem (they just use different btrfs subvolumes for their root). All three share a single EFI partition. I don’t expect anyone from Bluefin to help make that work. If it breaks I get to keep all the pieces.
If you have the experience and confidence, then I say go at it!
Haha, I like to see a man live dangerously! Small confession, I installed Aurora a couple of weeks ago, in it’s own partition, as I am a bit of a Plasma fanboy. Runs like a Swiss watch. I haven’t layered anything yet, but I’m going to do that, just so I can say I’ve done it. had a couple of other small niggles, but I’m retired, I don’t have any critical data. I just like installing Linux distros and playing with them. If the whole thing goes South it doesn’t really matter. But yes, I do backup regularly, on to an external disk. I lost all my emails once (I had a pop3 account, I use imap now) and that annoyed me, so, yeah, backups.
Experience? Been using Linux for over thirty years. Knowledge? Slightly more than zero. Confidence? Fools rush in.
Or if you didn’t want to select the boot device in BIOS each time, you could probably install rEFInd in one of the EFI partitions, always boot into rEFInd, and use it to select which OS to boot.
Although dual booting off of the same disk is unsupported (for all the good reasons mentioned above), Bazzite’s Dual Boot Preliminary and Post-Installation Setup Guide: B) Same drive method appears to work for Bluefin as well.
One current issue for dual booting atomic desktops using the same disk: Silverblue installation fails when the EFI partition isn’t reformatted. So, as mentioned in Bazzite’s setup guide, manually create a new EFI partition during installation, and then do ujust regenerate-grub after installation to add Windows to the grub boot menu.
If you can add a second drive to your device, or if you don’t feel comfortable with manual partitioning, it’s better to use Bluefin’s supported dual boot method: use automated partitioning and a dedicated drive for another operating system.
