William Morder composed on 2018-03-19 21:18 (UTC-0700):
Yes, running Debian Jessie 8.10 or whatever is the most recent update. I was wondering about how to format root. I am used to ext2 for root partition from older Ubuntu versions, but I see everybody using ext3 or ext4 now, so this might be part of the problem.
Formatting / is usually a default option in any Linux installer, but they tend to format the same type, which in your case is not desirable. Just be sure to specify / get formatted and /home not.
It is 32-bit because I installed a new motherboard, and that is all that was available for cheap. I've always run 64-bit before.
Any quick commands to find out CPU, chipset and gfxchip? And yes, some of it is old (I did say it's a Frankenstein), but my motherboard is pretty new.
lspci
or
inxi -v4
should do well enough.
cat /proc/cpuinfo
can be misleading to the uninitiated, but does report whether limited to 32-bit or not.