On 06/15/2019 09:22 AM, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
Le 15/06/2019 à 15:15, Richard Owlett a écrit :
I have one laptop explicitly set aside for experimenting with Debian
in order to determine *MY* ideal system. To this end I may have a half
dozen copies of Debian to chose from at boot.
For my purposes, the Debian installer has two annoyances:
1. swap area designation.
Everything is fine on the 1st installation.
On following installations, when the existing swap partition is
is to be used its UUID is changed. This causes grief for the
other installations by making swap area appear missing. My
I agree this is annoying. The Debian installer is not the only one doing
this.
personally preferred solution is to activate swap only of the
initial installation. For subsequent installs actually requiring
a swap partition, I edit its /etc/fstab .
Other workarounds exist :
- If you have plenty of disk space, create a separate swap for each
installation. Or no swap if you don't need it (enough RAM and no
hibernation).
I had wondered about something like that. I think I'm more comfortable
with one "largish" partition than several small ones.
- Use LVM logical volumes instead of plain partitions. When the swap is
in a logical volume, the installer uses its persistent device name
(actually a symlink) /dev/mapper/vgname-lvname instead of its UUID. So
changing the UUID does not disrupt anything. Also, IMO having multiple
test installations is a good use case for LVM as it allows to create,
resize and delete volumes of arbitrary sizes unlike partitions which
require sufficient contiguous disk space or moving partitions around.
I never noticed anything that attracted my attention to LVM. I will have
to do more reading.
2. Grub configuration.
The installer is egotistical enough to think that what is being
installed will always be the preferred version. NOT!
AFAICS, most installers (Linux and others) do the same.
My solution is install Grub only on the initial install and NO
boot loader on subsequent install. After completing one (or more)
additional installs, I boot the first install and run update-grub.
IMO installing GRUB with each system is desirable so that grub.cfg is
generated, as update-grub uses foreign grub.cfg files to properly
retrieve boot parameters.
The only thing I've read about multiple GRUBs has been comments on this
list - nothing intentionally organized. As most of the programming I've
done was back when 8085 was new tech, I strongly favor minimal resources.
In legacy mode, you can install GRUB in different locations : main GRUB
in the disk MBR and others in partition boot records. But in legacy mode
the installer does not allow to select a location and name, so at worst
if will overwrite the previous GRUB installed by Debian (if using the
same EFI partition) and at best if will overwrite the EFI boot entry (if
using a different EFI partition). It would be nice if the installer
could offer to define a custom identifier for the boot loader.
All my stuff is legacy.
