17 Mar
2018
17 Mar
'18
2:21 a.m.
On Friday 16 March 2018 14:27:08 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
Am Freitag, 16. März 2018 schrieb William Morder:
exactly. that's a good way not to loose your data :-)
Yes, that's pretty much how I set it up. Maybe I didn't make it clear that my
home folder is a separate partition from / - although it is on the same
drive. Right now it's like this:
sda1 = / (20 GB)
sda2 = swap (4 GB)
sda3 = /home (74 GB ... or so)
and then there's 5% or so for all that hidden space.
(This a 100 GB hard drive; all my other stuff is stored elsewhere.)
I have written in another post about my FrankenDebian; that's where I needed a
to create a separate boot partition.
Anyway, that's not my problem here. I am using a single hard drive for
installation. I do want to increase the root partition, though, and I find
that I tend to use swap a lot, probably because my computer is made up of
spare parts (hence a Frankenstein as well as a FrankenDebian), and I need to
put in more memory.
Space is cheap, by the way, if one has money to spend on hard drives; right
now I have to scratch for spare change to buy toilet paper. (I am not
joking.) However, all in good time. This too will pass. Nothing lasts for
ever.
In the meanwhile, I still have to do a lot of juggling to find space; I have
hard drives, but they are already quite full. (I live in a third-world
country known as San Francisco's Tenderloin: not a good place for anybody who
is over the age of about 35 or 40.) I hope that in another few months I can
splurge for at least 2 TB or so, but right now I have work to do, and need a
computer that does the job.
Okay, so with this fairly straightforward setup (the partition table listed
above), the Devuan installation disc seems to want to delete or overwrite my
home folder. I would prefer to resize it with gparted, which (I believe) is
also the partition manager used in the Debian setup.
Devuan and exegnulinux are both a little wonky on this point, but hey, they're
still in development. Still, I always end up with a half-installed system
when I've tried them.
I think my best plan is to use the method that I gleaned from the earlier
posts of Nik Klepp and deloptes. (I hope I got their names right.) My system
is already installed and runs pretty well, so it's better to make the switch
from Debian to Devuan by apt-get dist-upgrade. If I could just resize my
partition instead of deleting it, that would be grand; however, I have done a
backup of my home directory, just in case.
Also - one of those bugs - I cannot start gparted (or any gnome application)
as root. I've tried tdesu and gksu. The Trinity sudo works okay for TDE
programs, but the gksu always rejects my password, even though I am sure of
the password. This is also a problem when I do a new installation. I can only
get admin privileges by sudo or su when I am in a shell; and except for the
shell, it's not until after I've installed the Trinity packages (especially
the Trinity sudo packages) that I can do anything as root. It would be nice
to be able to resize the root partition (assuming I won't lose information in
the home partition ... but I've got a fresh backup, anyway). Otherwise, I
will proceed with a system reinstallation at some point, and resize
partitions then.
Thanks for any guidance here. I can generally do partitioning and system
installations in my sleep (and often have done), but this problem with sudo
(mentioned by myself and others elsewhere) is a pain in the *ma-hony*.
Bill
If your
home folder lives on the same partition as /, then you'll have
some work to do :-)
Yeah ... I copied my home folder to another hard drive (a precaution for
whenever I am about to experiment, or do something stupid); so that it
would be possible to make my home folder something like sdb3, etc. ... if
that is what you mean. Most of my important files are kept elsewhere, on
other hard BIG drives;
the root partion and home folder are installed on a 100 GB hard drive.
And I only use the home folder for temporary files, which will eventually
get moved to one of those other places. Otherwise, the only real purpose
of my home folder is to keep all my settings intact.
If I follow what you're saying, then I could partition that 100 GB hard
drive something like:
sda1 = /
sda2 = /boot
sda3 = swap
But that seems like a waste of space, as even a generous root partition
has never been bigger than about 30 GB, and a boot partition is maybe 2
or 3, and maybe 4-6 GB for swap -- which leaves at least 60 GB for what?
Or maybe something else would be better? Then I could use a partition on
sdb as my home folder?
Space is cheap. Anyhow, you most likely will never use swap. And /boot does
not need to be on a seperate partition, just keep it on /. You can always
resize/create/erase partitions with gparted (puppylinux comes in handy for
this), so it essentilly does not matter with what size you start, you can
always change that later. 20GB for / is OK, make the rest /home. But before
installing a new OS, please copy /home/your-user to
/home/copy-of-your-user - and check twice that you use the right partition
:-)
> Thanks for your advice,
>
> Bill
>
> > > My current system is Debian Jessie, and runs pretty much like I want,
> > > except for some minor bugs. My biggest complaint is systemd, and I
> > > really want to go back to using sysvinit.
> > >
> > > Also: I wonder if it is possible to switch to Devuan without doing a
> > > complete reinstallation? i.e., after changing over to sysvinit, can I
> > > enable Devuan repositories (and disable Debian), then do something
> > > like sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> > > or whatever?
> > >
> > > Bill
> >
> > You can move from debian jessie to devuan jessie without problems, just
> > follow the guide
> > https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-jessie-announce-052517 section
> > "Upgrade". When you do the upgrade, please do it on a console, not on
a
> > X11 terminal.
> >
> > Nik
> >
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