On May 19 2010 12:46 -0400, from vev@michvhf.com (Vince Vielhaber): > What problems (and solutions) should I be expecting when she installs > the drive in her computer? I'm assuming the network setup will be one > problem. If you use a generic kernel binary and install most variations of hardware-specific packages (thinking xserver-xorg-video-*, for example), my experience is that the issues should be minimal. The default Debian installation does this. > My background is mainly in FreeBSD. If a drive is set up as being > /dev/ad0 and the other machine sees it as /dev/ad4 it won't complete > the boot, it'll complain with a cannot mount root error. Will that be > an issue with Debian? You can use UUIDs instead of physical devices, and the kernel will find the partition in question regardless of where it is physically hooked up. The main downside is that UUIDs are rather opaque, but unless your friend is planning on having a lot of drives in her PC or mess around with /etc/fstab and the boot loader configuration, this should be a non-issue. If it is, look up "labels" - they work largely the same but are human-assigned and human-readable. As far as I have gathered, whenever Linux expects a physical device node such as /dev/hda2 or /dev/sdb1, you can instead pass a string on the format "UUID=<long-hexstring-with-dashes>". So an example fstab entry might look like this: UUID=1e7c6b1a-5c25-4efa-866c-9a6a086b0292 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1 In the boot loader configuration, you'd pass the same kind of string to the kernel through the "root" parameter, like so: kernel /kernel-binary root=UUID=1e7c6b1a-5c... ro ... The contents of /dev/disk/by-uuid & Co will be very helpful. -- Michael Kjörling .. michael@kjorling.se .. http://michael.kjorling.se * ..... No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings ..... * * ENCRYPTED email preferred -- OpenPGP keys: 0x32D6B8C6, 0xBDE9ADA6 * * ASCII Ribbon Campaign: Against HTML mail, proprietary attachments *
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