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 Author | Topic: Does the installer format the home partition? (Read 709 times) |
praxis
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|  | Does the installer format the home partition?
« Thread Started on Jan 24, 2011, 4:19am » | |
I'm trying out SalineOS & was going to install it but after I selected a /, swap & /home partition remastersys seems to say that it is going to format my /home partition even though it is already formatted ex4 and has data on it. That really isn't the behavior I want since I was hoping to share that partition with my already installed Mint (using a different user name). Naturally formatting the "/" partition is all good.
BTW, the UserManual pdf has a rather unclear entry about home partitions:
12 It will now prompt you where to install /home to, select “put /home
on the root partition”.
Otherwise, SalineOS 1.0 seems pretty nice. I'm not wild about dark themes, but the large bold fonts seem to make it work well enough (and I'd change it soon, anyway, I suspect). fotoxx seems like a neat application, though I think I like mtpaint better. ePDFviewer seems quit nice. rhythmbox isn't at all to my taste as a music player, but it is easy enough to install audacious. I'll have to play around with parole.
Gigolo claims to have mounted a samba share and ssh share but I can't find them, not even in ~/.gvfs. Double clicking on the supposedly mounted shares does not open them in Thunar, as I gather it is supposed to do. This may just be because I'm using the live DVD.
Other comments: the xfce4 volume manager didn't have any controls selected by default, never quite seen that before. wicd required me to manually enter my wifi's name. Strangely initially "iwlist wlan0 scan" initially told me that the interface didn't support scanning until I entered my wifi name in wicd.
Looks like a nice distro, though. Installing it would save me time grabbing firmware & enabling non-free and multimedia repositories. It seems like some codecs are installed, but apparently flash is not, no big deal. Not including smbfs is a little puzzling, though, since it makes it impossible to mount samba shares from the CLI.
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Anthony Nordquist
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #1 on Jan 24, 2011, 4:45am » | |
The only gstreamer plugins installed by default are the default for gstreamer and the fluendo mp3 codec. The script for restricted multimedia is gksu installrestrictedmultimedia . It installs the flash plug-in as well. And, it does format /home that is why the instructions say to put it on the root partition.
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fragadelic
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #2 on Jan 24, 2011, 10:40am » | |
I am thinking about changing the installer to give you the option of formatting /home or using it as is.
The problem with this is that folks tend to use the same usernames on the different distros they use and then permissions becomes a problem. In addition to permission problems for the different distros using the same /home folder you run into the issue that config files for the same apps may not be compatible due to version changes.
My recommendation is that if you are going to use the same /home partition you need to use different usernames for the different distributions you use that share this /home partition.
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Anthony Nordquist
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #3 on Jan 24, 2011, 10:51am » | |
I will be adding fusesmb and smbfs to 1.1. Thank you for pointing out smbfs  The volume manager in stock Debian Xfce does not select controls either. I believe this is an upstream Xfce default, the making you choose the ones you want that is.
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praxis
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #4 on Jan 24, 2011, 1:08pm » | |
I was definitely planning on using a different user name, fragedelic. Though it would be awkward, maybe a warning to folks not to share user names between distros would be in order in the UserManual if you decide to change the installer to allow reusing home partitions. Thanks for the prompt responses.
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Anthony Nordquist
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #5 on Jan 24, 2011, 1:22pm » | |
If Fragedelic decides to change the installer to allow this, then I am sure he will add a note on the installer window himself. I will then add more information in the user manual if I think its required. Looking at the code it wouldn't be too hard for me to patch it to not format /home, but Saline OS uses fragedelics repository for remastersys. So that behavior would change should he update remastersys, and that would be awkward(Specially if people remaster their Saline OS install). For something optional like not putting /home on /root, it's really not worth it.
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cristobal
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #6 on Feb 17, 2011, 2:07pm » | |
Remastersys as I understand it is for re-distributing a personalized version of Ubuntu or Debian. As such it doesn't lend itself very well to any pre-installation customization as that may differ greatly from original personalized version. A true installer would allow more partitioning choices as well as package selection.
What we have here is Anthony Nordquist's version of Debian Squeeze. Best version I've ever seen, by the way, but I've only tried the default non-expert Debian install, so let me add that its up there among the best XFCE desktops I have ever used including Vector Linux.
If Saline had an ncurses-based installer like VL's, it could be a much more versatile Debian version and even a true Debian-based distribution.
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scifidude79
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #7 on Feb 17, 2011, 2:21pm » | |
I like the Remastersys installer. It's simple, straightforward and to the point. I've seen a lot of installers since I upgraded my internet to DSL and started distro hopping and the one for Saline is among my favorites. Also, you can't do better than GParted for partitioning, IMO. If you want your /home partition formatted, do it in GParted. Otherwise, I don't think it does it. (though, I could be wrong about that)
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cristobal
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #8 on Feb 17, 2011, 2:39pm » | |
You should be able to boot from any partition you want to. This really helps when multibooting other OS's. Apparently you can't use Remastersys to boot from a /boot partition or keep your home partition unformatted, which is main question in this thread.
Remastersys is not a distribution installer and shouldn't be used for installing anything other than a personalized or backed up version of an existing distribution.
I have already uninstalled remastersy and disabled the geekconnection repository. This is just my opinion. I am not suggesting that anyone else shouldn't be happy with Saline just the way it is. I personally do not wish to re-install everything from scratch with Remastersys for each and every dot release.
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Anthony Nordquist
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #9 on Feb 17, 2011, 3:12pm » | |
Feb 17, 2011, 2:39pm, cristobal wrote:You should be able to boot from any partition you want to. This really helps when multibooting other OS's. Apparently you can't use Remastersys to boot from a /boot partition or keep your home partition unformatted, which is main question in this thread.
Remastersys is not a distribution installer and shouldn't be used for installing anything other than a personalized or backed up version of an existing distribution.
I have already uninstalled remastersy and disabled the geekconnection repository. This is just my opinion. I am not suggesting that anyone else shouldn't be happy with Saline just the way it is. I personally do not wish to re-install everything from scratch with Remastersys for each and every dot release. |
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You do not have to reinstall for every point release. The installer does format /home and does not support /boot. For 98% of people this behavior is fine. Putting all the different mount points across several partitions would lengthen the install quite a bit. Actually for package selection I could do up something in the installer, but I don't know if theres much of a point. If you need something you can install it later and if there are things included you don't need you can purge them.
The repository is left enable as Remastersys development is never stagnant. In fact there are at least two things I know Fragadelic is working on as we speak.
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joutlan
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #10 on Feb 17, 2011, 4:08pm » | |
Feb 17, 2011, 3:12pm, Anthony Nordquist wrote:| [quote author=cristobal board=installsetup thread=59 post=1923 time=1297971589]//snip// The installer does format /home and does not support /boot. For 98% of people this behavior is fine.//snip// |
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Yes, /boot is a non issue for me. I asked this somewhere else so considered it answered here
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Anthony Nordquist
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #11 on Feb 22, 2011, 12:57am » | |
I would like to inform anyone that comes across this thread that as of SalineOS 1.2 you now have the option to not format /home. This is documented in the new user manual as well.
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rc10b
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #12 on Feb 22, 2011, 11:13am » | |
That's good news for me, thanks.
I've used Remastersys to backup my installation in case I bork my / partition. Now I can re-install, leaving my /home partition intact.
(I believe there is a way to back up what's in /home by using skel, but now I don't need to find out how )
Edit: Spelling !
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murdock
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #13 on Feb 27, 2011, 2:48pm » | |
Jan 24, 2011, 10:40am, fragadelic wrote:I am thinking about changing the installer to give you the option of formatting /home or using it as is.
The problem with this is that folks tend to use the same usernames on the different distros they use and then permissions becomes a problem. In addition to permission problems for the different distros using the same /home folder you run into the issue that config files for the same apps may not be compatible due to version changes.
My recommendation is that if you are going to use the same /home partition you need to use different usernames for the different distributions you use that share this /home partition.
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I'd definitely recommend that. It only takes a second to create a new user and delete the other.
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Anthony Nordquist
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| | Re: Does the installer format the home partition?
« Reply #14 on Feb 27, 2011, 3:38pm » | |
The installer has gotten a lot of love recently from all around. Stay tuned for SalineOS 1.3 image builds. I have cooked up 904 lines of code for the installer mad scientist style (And, I am not done yet). Well technically I am writing a standalone program for the installer to call on much like it does GParted. Uses the Zenity toolkit so it will be transparent to the end user, it just adds more dialogs. By the time I am done the only things the installer won't have that other popular installers have is an "Erase and use entire disk" option and support for random partitions like opt and boot.
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