On Tue November 30 2021 02:46:14 Gene Heskett wrote:

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Hi Gene,

Please keep replies on list so they're available for others to see and learn from or to correct my mistakes. I'm moving this back on list but privacy rules prevent me from quoting to the list what you sent me off list.

Bullseye is a great choice here and now.

You have told us that you have used "sudo -E ..." although you haven't told us why you used "-E". What "-E" does is run as root but on your own home folder, not root's. This can easily leave stuff in your home folder which is owned by root and cannot be handled by your regular user account and that can cause all kinds of breakage. You might be able to fix it with something like "chown -R ..." and "chgrp -R ..." but that might make things worse.

You have told us that you have gdm3, lightdm, and tdm-trinity on this new install and you have also had kde installed but it is mostly removed now. That ought to work but it is not really a good idea. Think about what you need and only install what you need. Installing hundreds of unneeded packages creates a lot more security vulnerabilities than allowing a root login with a 16-character random password. You can always block ssh root logins without blocking console root logins because if the CIA is sitting at your physical keyboard you're pwned already mate.

You really have two choices when installing Debian: a canned install or an expert install. If you choose a canned install you're not TTBOMK going to get RAID10. If you choose expert install you need to know what you're doing. Over the years I've used HW RAID1, HW RAID5, SW RAID1, and SW RAID5 but IIRC I've never used RAID10 and today IMNSHO LVM is much better. But again you have to know what you're doing and why.

Whether you use RAID10 or LVM or mercury delay lines you're going to have options in the Debian installer to format each FILESYSTEM. You don't need to spend ten hours zeroing PARTITIONS.

So my advice to you is make a plan, do everything in the simplest and most standard way possible except where you need something different, and document exactly what you plan, what you do, and what happens. We can't help you much if you spend a few hours knitting semi-random stitches and then want us to help you turn it into a sweater.

One of the key decisions you will make will be systemd vs sysvinit. I use sysvinit. If in doubt you should use systemd because it is the canned standard solution and you don't want to deviate from that without good reason. Just like you don't want to use "sudo -E" without good reason.

Good luck Gene,

--Mike