Hello. I'm a long time Debian person, almost always unstable, bits experimental. I very seldom install. I had the opportunity to shrink a NTFS filesystem and install Debian today from the Debian- Live (KDE-386) DVD image I downloaded last night.
I had thought about installing kubuntu on this machine, but I don't want to change to Wayland at some time in the near future. Which was why I went to the Debian-Live disk. I've actually backed up the NTFS side 3 times in the last couple of days. All with bzip2 compression. As one might expect, the contents of sectors not in use (or the ends of the last sectors of files) is not very compressible. I was working with a disk which had a newly installed (and I had to activate) version of Windows- XP Professional for refurbished systems. I hadn't (yet) deleted anything, and the only thing I had added was Firefox 4 and Comodo firewall. An 80 GB disk became a 4.1E9 byte compressed image. Copying /dev/zero to all of the freespace, and then deleting that file resulted in a compressed image of 2.9E9 bytes. After testing a couple of things, I then proceeded to delete M$Office and some CA security package which came on the install. Using partimage from what is the current (and old) system rescue disk, again using bzip2 compression, I got a file of about 2.3E9 bytes. If people have time, I suspect this idea of zeroing unused sectors is useful. nice cat /dev/zero > zero.fill ; sync ; sleep 1 ; sync ; rm -r zero.fill Where zero.fill is a complete path name to some file in the top directory of the device you want to fill with zeros. Apparently a program called zerofree does much the same thing. It (and partimage) isn't on kubuntu 10.10. It may be that the version of partimage on sysrescue is old, I didn't check. It is kind of clunky. Some people have mentioned ntfsclone, I didn't try it (how many backups do I need?). I looked for partman on the Debian-Live DVD, and was surprised to find it there only as a package. Fine, I started the installer, and among other things, I see it installed partman somewhere (ramdisk presumably). I was surpised at how few things the Debian-installer would do automagically as far as partitioning goes. But, as I have made something like 13 partitions on a disk in the past to install things, manual was okay by me. The first quirk I ran into, is that the installer asks you if it should write changes to disk, before you have even done anything. Fine, write nothing. There seems to be times when hitting continue doesn't seem to do anything. and while double clicking some line in the installer gets the screen to adjust itself, after a few seconds it is apparent it hasn't done anything either. I just sort of stumbled across the double clicking on a line by chance, I don't know if that is documented or not. Anyway, i shrink the NTFS partition enough, create a swap and a root partition. And then I ask the installer to write those changes. It comes up and asks me if I want to make changes to ALL the disks it knows about (I had a USB external disk connected at the time). As I had done nothing to the partitioning of the USB disk, I answered yes anyway. But I think that is something you should trap. When I told it to write the partition table, I was a little surprised to find shortly later that it automagically started formatting the root partition as ext3 (which is what I had indicated in partitioning). Fine, it would be doing that for a while, so I went off to shovel some snow (we still have lots of snow in NW Alberta, Canada). I come inside to find that not only has it finished partitioning, it is almost done installing Debian. Isn't this a manual method? Aren't you supposed to stop after partitoning and/or formatting for user input in manual method? Oh well, I kept rolling with the flow. After the installer was done, I asked Debian/Linux to reboot the machine. The CD/DVD drive did various things for a long time, reboot didn't happen. So I cycled the power. The default grub timeout (5 seconds) is too short. I was looking for it, and even then I didn't have enough time to book XP to see if it still worked. When Linux came up, I adjusted /etc/default/grub (or something like that) to give it a longer timeout, and ran update-grub. Asking the machine to halt worked (this seems to be common with boots of CD, not being able to deal with the power). XP came up, and it noticed its partition had changed and checked it, no problems. Rebooting again, Debian came up fine. Without checking, I ran apt-get update (or aptitiude update), and I got asked for the CD. Later, I looked at /etc/apt/sources.list, and seen that the only thing there was the CD. A couple of weeks ago on a lark, I tried apt-spy, and it doesn't run any more on unstable. How else does one easily come up with a sources.list file? Well, it seems someone in Switzerland has an aswer: http://debgen.simplylinux.ch/generate.php Copy and paste, and you have an sources.list file which may not be optimal, but it works. But in general, things worked fine. There were a couple of points a newbie would not get past. Take care. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201103291920.35514.ghave...@materialisations.com
