By skyforbes I saw a Sony VAIO (SVF152C29L) in the ewaste pile at work and figured why not. It had a 1TB hard drive, 8GB of RAM, and some early-2010s CPU/GPU. Not great but worth a shot.
I got home, turned it on, and the whole laptop screen was just white. Plugged it into HDMI and Windows came up fine, so the internals were okay. Decided I’d just run it on an external monitor.
Since I switched my main gaming PC to Fedora, I wanted Linux on this one too. The problem was the VAIO wouldn’t show its boot menu on the second monitor, so I couldn’t select the USB drive.
Side note: a coworker/previous owner of laptop who’s a veteran had hyped this laptop up like it was loaded with “super advanced security features” and was “almost impossible” to install Linux on because he bought it off base. None of it was true. He just made up a bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense, and I didn't encounter anything he warned me about.
I flashed Nobara KDE on another machine and tried booting it. It would start the hard drive but nothing would appear on the external monitor. Tried several distros:
Nobara KDE
Fedora Lite KDE
Pop!_OS
a couple others
They all hit the same wall.
Then I remembered having issues as a kid where Windows Boot Manager blocked Linux. So I tried Zorin OS, and that actually got past it and booted.
I don’t like Zorin, but it at least installed. I set up PCSX2 and got the system running games.
Now I just want to switch the VAIO to something else, because Zorin isn’t what I want to stick with. I would like to use Nobara. Any suggestions to get past window boot manager?