Hi Paul, paul e condon wrote: > I purchased some time ago a refurb Dell GX620. I have received > conflicting advice on this list about whether I should use amd64 or > i386 CDs to install Wheezy, but amd64 CDs seem to get further into > the install so what I want help with now is all about amd64 type > CDs.
As far as installation goes either i386 or amd64 should install and complete successfully. There shouldn't be any difference in terms of supported architecture for either of those. That you are seeing a difference is troubling and probably means that the media is corrupted for one of them. The difference is either 32-bit or 64-bit. There is a lot of conflicting advice because there isn't clearly one that is always superior to the other. For some things 32-bit is better. For other things 64-bit is better. And therefore in the end you will simply need to pick one and move forward with it. I will say a few words about each. The amd64 is newer and "cooler" and so there has been a lot of momentum moving that direction. It has more cpu registers and therefore the compiler can optimize code to run faster by making use of the extra registers. But pointers are 64-bit each and use more memory. Applications that have a lot of pointers to data need a lot more memory. In general a 64-bit system tends to use more memory than a 32-bit system. Therefore if you are short on memory then a 32-bit system is more efficient. Memory is quite affordable these days and an 8G 64-bit amd64 system will often be cheaper than a 4G 32-bit i386 system. With the more memory and performance I would always pick amd64 at that point. If I only had a 2G machine then I would stay with a 32-bit i386 system. For a long time closed source proprietary applications were usually only 32-bit. Think Adobe Flash and so forth. So having a plain 32-bit system often made using these 3rd party closed nonfree blobs easier. But since so many people are using 64-bit these days most of those problems have been resolved in one way or another and for the most part a 64-bit amd64 system will now run anything that a 32-bit i386 system will run. If that is truly a concern for you then sticking with a 32-bit system might make things simpler. But I only install 64-bit amd64 these days. > I set out to install using LVM and selected a single large logical > partition. The disk has a capacity of 160GB. The install failed > because, the error message said the requested architecture was not > available on the mirror that I had chosen. What mirror did you choose? I routinely use ftp.us.debian.org from the installation menu. > But it did not say what architecture it thought I had chosen. What installation image did you use? One of the fixed architectures or one of the multi-architectures? > And the 'mirror' that I was invoking is my local installation of > approx on a wheezy on a different local computer. I haven't used approx for a long time. I can't remember if it is hard configured for upstream sites or if it is totally transparent. I have been using apt-cacher-ng and like it. It is transparent, meaning that whatever upstream you are asking for is cached and proxied. I liked it better than approx. Other than that if you have CD#1 (or DVD or whatever) you should be able to install a complete minimum system only from it. After installation then you can switch the /etc/apt/sources.list to your approx proxy and install additional components. > I look into /var/cache on that computer and both amd64 and i386 are > present in the approx cache. This morning I resume work and the > first thing I want to do is try again, because I do make > mistakes. But this morning I cannot repartition the disk using the > partitioning system on the CD that was burnt from a jigdo iso image > on May 31. It would not delete/remove/whatever the LVM and would not > recognize it as a usable /root. There is a confusing behavior of the installer and I think you are hitting it. If there is an existing partition table then it will present it to you and allow you to use it. If the existing partition table indicates RAID or LVM partitions then it will allow you to use those too. Which means that if you *don't* want to use them that you need to do some more work to avoid the pre-existing ones and to set up new ones. There is an option to configure the LVM manager. From memory I believe you need to select that option and then delete and deactivate LVM if you don't want to us it. Same thing for RAID. I remember this being slightly confusing if you are wanting to install freshly upon it because it shows you the previous pre-existing configuration. But many people want that because they have other operating systems on the disk and they want to partition it using the other system first and then install and this behavior allows them to keep the other systems alive and intact and install around them. If this is too much hassle then you can always zero out the partition table first and then install after having zeroed the table. (Or disk, but that would take a while.) Once the table is zeroed then you can partition fresh. However some things like RAID and LVM have signatures on disk and if the partition turns out to be the same as before then the signature will appear as valid and it may come alive again anyway. Both lvm and mdadm have ways to zero out their own respective signatures. > So, I plugged in a external USB hard drive and tried to install on > it. It refused to write on either drive until I did something with > the left over logical volume, mentioning it by name. This is quite vague. I can't determine what you did. But if you will pardon my bluntness I am certain that you selected a secure shred erase option and that isn't what you were wanting to do. > As I write this email I am doing a partition erase on the logical > volume. I think a data erase is where it actually writes random data over the partition to securely void any previous data there. That usually isn't needed. > I tried selecting 'do not use this device' , which to me should have > been sufficient, but it wasn't. No. Because then the disk space would remain consumed. You want to free up the disk space and reallocate it to new logical volumes. You can't just leave it consumed but not used. > Erase is going slowly. At the rate the patience bar is growing, it > should be finished in another 12 hrs or so. Sounds about right for the secure data shred option. But you should not need to do that. > Is there a better way? What should I try if it still claims my > architecture is not available on my mirror? etc. Ideas? I myself would simply look very carefully at the options at installation time and adjust whatever is showing me. For example if it has lvm partitions already then I would "configure the lvm manager" and remove the previous partitions and create new ones as I desire them. It is less hassle than trying to zero the disk. You can also unconfigure completely the lvm manager. Back it all out. Then reboot and start the installation fresh. With the lvm de-configured it won't be pre-existing anymore. Unfortunately my main debug VM system is Sid and my VM system is quite broken at the moment due to Sid breakage. So I can't just jump in and create a VM and walk through the debian-installer in order to review what needs to be done. At the moment I would actually need to set up real hardware to do that and then I couldn't take screenshots. And it would take much longer and no time to do it. But I know that it is possible. Bob
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