On 2022-05-31 16:18:42 Felix Miata wrote:

J Leslie Turriff composed on 2022-05-31 15:23 (UTC-0500):

...

I've been using an EFI (not UEFI) system for years to run OpenSuSE Linux (since I have no Windoze on my machine I saw no reason to fool with UEFI, which had teething problems when I got my motherboard). Now I'm trying to install Ubuntu 20 LTS on a separate drive, but the installer is complaining about EFI and boot partitions. I've searched for help, but all I get is UEFI stuff. I don't want to reset my BIOS because then I wouldn't be able to boot back to my old system if I have problems with Ubuntu. Is anyone here interested in giving me a helping hand?

It's possible to have a UEFI on one disk and MBR/Legacy on another, but you'd have to manually construct required stanzas to enable booting one type from the other type. That's no problem at if you don't mind booting from the PC's BBS menu whenever you wish to boot from the other disk. Also, other can be added to current and vice versa manually by constructing /boot/grub2/custom.cfg and/or editing one of nn_CUSTOM in /etc/grub.d/. I've never actually tried booting UEFI Linux from Legacy Grub, but I have booted Legacy Linux from UEFI Grub. I never spent much time marrying Legacy with UEFI, because it's so much simpler just to get used to using the BBS hotkey when needed.

What could possibly be different about the basics between EFI and UEFI I've never pondered, other than without U it would be older and thus less well developed than newer versions.

"older" == "mature" :-D

I have 8 UEFI PCs including 1 Mac. All but the first are booting UEFI. UEFI is more sophisticated and IMO a vast improvement. Its different, but in this case different is better. My first that isn't using UEFI was my first exposure to UEFI, and an upgrade that included moving 3 disks with RAID1 on 2 of them, so I was only interested in quick success, not learning RAID in a UEFI context at the same time as learning UEFI.

That's basically the way I started; and there was a lot of FUD about most UEFI partition being too small for Linux but nothing much about sizing it right, so I just stuck with EFI.

IIRC, I have only one out of 30+ working multi- multiboot PCs on which Ubuntu is installed other than on an only disk. One OS installation per disk I never do.

I have just one PC and one ancient Mac. This is my first time trying multiboot. I can get as far as the partitioning step in Ubuntu install, but I want separate /opt and /usr/local partitions, so I can't just use the default single partition install. The installer says I need

IMO, your best way forward, subject to any EFI limitations imposed by your PC, is to install Ubuntu in EFI mode, then at some point in time convert the openSUSE installation to EFI mode.

Leslie --

On 2022-06-02 03:25:31 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:

Anno domini 2022 Tue, 31 May 19:41:56 -0500

J Leslie Turriff scripsit:

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[...]       I have just one PC and one ancient Mac.  This is my first time trying multiboot.  I can get as far as the partitioning step in Ubuntu install, but I want separate /opt and /usr/local partitions, so I can't just use the default single partition install.  The installer says I need

You can go with one partition for everything. When your system is up and running: boot a live linux, shrink / to free space and add partitions - either by using the live system or booting your OS and then create some partitions. Move stuff over, add the entries in /ets/fstab and be happy :)

Nik

Well, I figured out that the Ubuntu installer just won't work without an EFI partition, so I reformatted the drive with one extra 1M partition and got past that; then I had a lot of fun relearning how to map and mount LUKS encrypted partitions by hand. I got that done and then found that the Ubuntu flavour of TDE names some of its components differently than the OpenSuSE flavour: Ubuntu TDM calls itself 'Trinity' in the desktop selector, whereas on OpenSuSE it's 'TDE', so when booting back and forth and logging in I have to remember to set that each time; when I rebooted into OpenSuSE many of the standard applets in the main panel disappeared and I had to figure out how to get TDE Menu back and remember the names of the others; then I found that Firefox is implemented as a snap package in Ubuntu, and apparently must be installed on each user account on the machine (what a waste!), but so far I haven't figured out how to find packages in Ubuntu, and searching the web, I only find stuff about GUI package managers that don't seem to be installed... I guess I'll just install Leap 15.4 next week when it's gone GA; I was hoping to be able to get access to the pre-GA versions of TDE, but I guess that's not in the cards...

Leslie --

On 2022-06-02 10:58:23 Felix Miata wrote:

J Leslie Turriff composed on 2022-06-02 03:44 (UTC-0500):

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I guess I'll just install Leap 15.4 next week when it's gone GA; I was hoping to be able to get access to the pre-GA versions of TDE, but I guess that's not in the cards...

Use this repo

[TDEhomeBS] baseurl=https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/PunisherHD:/Trinit y:/stable/15.4/ gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/PunisherHD:/Trinity :/stable/15.4/repodata/repomd.xml.key enabled=1 name=TDEhomeBS type=rpm-md

until François has built for 15.4. Until I found out about Punisher, I had been using the 15.3 version just fine with 15.4alpha/betas, and with 15.2's with 15.3alpha/betas, and 15.1's with 15.2alpha/betas....

There's no reason to wait until release has been announced. What's on the mirrors now isn't going to change next week, except for population of the updates repo, for things that missed cutoff dates.

That's fine, the current TDE repository seems to work well enough with Leap 15.4. Hopefully François will publish on the announcement list when he has finished his build. It appears that only the stable version is made available to non-Debian-based users; I understand that builds for other versions would be labour-intensive, but sometimes it would be nice...

FWIW, I've never put /opt on its own filesystem, but /usr/local I always have separate. I rarely see anything want to go on /opt except for TDE, KDE3, Brother printer drivers, or long ago some office suite. I would not try sharing /opt between openSUSE & Ubuntu for TDE. Given the different package names used, I'd expect some differences in filenames or versions.

I have to wonder why package naming would affect the names of executables, but apparently it does; very strange and unexpected.

FWIW2, I don't normally install any distro's Firefox or SeaMonkey. Instead I use the packages provided by mozilla.org, and update at my pleasure. I keep them, and Pale Moon, in /usr/local, along with fonts not provided by distros.

For sure, expecially since OpenSuSE is so often far behind current versions of many packages (notably fonts), I often install them from their native repos into /usr/local. Some that contain extensive file trees, like mozilla, I do put into /opt; but that's just my personal idiosyncracy.

Leslie