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Re: Intended question - was {Re: Forgot name of Debian "configuration" {wrong word?} file}

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.
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