On 5/22/23 11:43, mick.crane wrote:
This is a request for best practice, perceived knowledge.
For one reason and another this PC/Workstation (what is the difference?)
boots in legacy mode. It was something to do with the SS usb port not
booting the installer in EFI mode.
I forget exactly.
Anyway, it's a niggle that it is legacy mode and changing a working
system seems a palaver.
As I have the /home stuff all being/copied onto another disk I thought
I'd reinstall and try to get it tidy.
Why do you think legacy mode is untidy?
I do not use multi-boot; I install mobile racks in my computers and put
each OS instance on its own drive. This allows me to use BIOS/ MBR/
legacy mode, which is simpler to install and simpler to image/ clone:
1. No UEFI boot variables/entries to create; BIOS/MBR detects devices
connected to interfaces and I use Setup to set the boot order. (I also
set "Boot USB Devices First", so I can boot a live USB stick without
having to touch Setup.) In UEFI mode, I must use Setup to create a boot
table entry that includes the correct bootloader file in the correct
ESP. Once I have a correct UEFI boot entry, then I can set the boot
order. These UEFI steps are inobvious if you have never heard of them,
and there is more than one way to screw it up (pick the wrong ESP or
wrong bootloader file).
2. No ESP confusion. I attempted to create a Debian bootable USB stick
using d-i in "Install" mode on a computer with an NVMe drive and Windows
10. d-i did not ask me where to put GRUB; d-i automatically added
entries into the ESP on the NVMe drive (!). This made the USB flash
drive unbootable in any other computer and made the boot table entry
useless whenever the USB stick was not connected.
3. No GPT secondary partition table. I install BIOS/ MBR with a 1 GB
boot partition, 1 GB encrypted swap partition, and 13 GB encrypted root
partition. Once I have Debian installed on a 16+ GB HDD, SSD, or USB
flash drive, I can boot alternate media and copy the system drive from
LBA 0 through the end of the root partition to a file on a USB HDD. I
can later reverse the process onto the same system device or onto any
other 16+ GB device, and the restored Debian instance "just works".
With GPT, there is a secondary/ backup partition table located at the
end of the device. This forces you into to less flexible imaging
choices: copy the entire device and restore onto a device of exactly the
same size, copy the entire device and fix the GPT secondary table after
restoring onto a device of different size, copy from LBA 0 to the end of
the root partition then add a GPT table after restore, copy LBA 0
through the end of root in one piece, copy the GPT secondary table in
another piece, restore the first piece, do the math, and restore the
second piece, etc..
I thought to try this virtualisation.
Why?
Q1. Would openbox be the one to go for?
Things I use work happily on Bookworm but seems openbox is only
available in Sid for now.
Should I try to build openbox or try to get it from Sid if OpenBox is
what I want?
I have purchased 64Gb of this DIMM memory for the experimentation.
mick
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
David
