I have a triple booting Thinkpad T495, Ryzen 3500U, 24 gig RAM, 1 TB Nvme drive. Windows, 150 gig; MX Linux and Manjaro, 70 gig, each. The two Linux partitions share a common /home, 650 gig. EFI.
I want to ditch Manjaro, not satisfactory at all…I did a regular update, and the kernel…disappeared, and Manjaro doesn’t boot! So, on to a (hopefully) better rolling distro, Tumbleweed.
All I want to check is that the Tumbleweed installation partitioning is correct. Only the current Manjaro partition (n1p5) gets the “F” for “will be formatted.” It will go from ext4 to btrfs, snapshots permitted. It will be labeled as “Tumbleweed” and mounted as “/” All other mount points, /home, /boot/efi and swap remain the same. The current MX partition will not be touched, nor mounted, if I boot into Tumbleweed.
Anything I’m forgetting?
What about grub? I haven’t done this in so long, do I need to run grub-update, or will the installer just add a new entry automagically.
Changes to fstab?
Thanks to all. Don’t want to pull the trigger on this till it’s confirmed.
Also, why can’t I post an attachment, with a screenshot?
One additional comment. If your EFI partition is smaller than 256M, the installer will complain. But you can just set it to be mounted at “/boot/efI”, and ignore the complaint.
Not sure why I would bother to delete the Manjaro partition. As I described in my initial post, I propose using the expert partitioner to reformat it as btrfs (now ext4.) Is that not equivalent/sufficient?
And what exactly do you mean by a “system partition.” Something that mounts as root (/) ? I’ve already said that I would do that, too, in the newly formatted btrfs partition of some 70GB that would replace the old Manjaro.
In fact, I think that the OpenSuSE documentation you’ve pointed me at is woefully inadequate, and would be more than happy to point to reasons why, and help improve it. In particular, it doesn’t really address (examples would be nice) the very common case of a person dual- (or more-) booting a system, either with Windows plus Linux, or multiple Linuxes (or whatever…Linux and some BSD variant.) That’s not all, but it would be a start.
If I’ve missed something you’re suggesting, please let me know. Likewise, I’m quite serious about contributing to improved documentation…so if you know whom to contact, I’d appreciate that person/group’s name.
Although the openSUSE installer is very flexible (When you reach the “layout” screen, you will have options to use the default layout, a guided layout where the default is the same but allows modifying with simple selections, or the Expert Partitioner where you are presented with a highly detailed graphical tool where you start with what you have without any proposal),
The general recommendation if you want to hand over full control to the Installer is to create or arrange for unpartitioned (not just unformatted) space.
The Installer will find that space and propose doing everything that’s necessary for installing in it.
I do no see this. When you have a partition and you want to create a new file system on it, then
mkfs ..........
is easy enough.
Of course you can use the equivalent of a so called “partitioner” for that, but that is only a wrapper.
I do not see how deleting a partition (that is removing it’s entry from the partition table) and then creating the same partition (same number, same starting point, same end point in the same place in the partition table) is more reliable then just leaving it as it is.
yast2 partitioner is more than a wrapper. It presents all information in a comfortable panel.
It deals with /etc/fstab
It supports UUIDs which are the only reliable option when dealing with multiple drives and moving drives between machines. I never need to remember which header on the mainboard to use (yes, labels work too but only until you encounter identical labels). *]Partitioner sets up btrfs system partitions. You don’t want to do this manually.
I do not see how deleting a partition (that is removing it’s entry from the partition table) and then creating the same partition (same number, same starting point, same end point in the same place in the partition table) is more reliable then just leaving it as it is.
Altogether it’s 3 clicks.You make sure there is no stale information around like creating a new user with an empty new home directory.
I agree roughly with this, but IMHO it has nothing to do with my remarks. I am talking here about the strict partitioning. YaST will do no more then fdisk/gdisk will do.
What stale information? Deleting a partion from the partition table only removes some information from the partition table (maybe indeed leaving some stale information). Creating then exact the same partition again will put exact the same information that was there before in the partition table. Nobody can afterwards see the difference.
This was NOT about the power and helpfulness of any so called “partitioner” that in fact indeed does much more then just partitioning. This was about the action to delete a partition and create it exact the same, only because the file system on it should be newly created. My statement is that that is a superfluous action. That is regardless of the fact if you do this by using the basic tools, or if you do this using a higher level system management tool.
I am not sure what you try to communicate to me with the above.
When you remove a partition and then create it with the same values, the only thing that will be different in (and only in) GPT will be the PARTUUID. All else will be (and should be, because the starting point is that you want it to be the same) the same. And that different PARTUUID is of minor importance IMHO.
Can you reliably identify how the existing partition was created? I am not so sure. I do not rely on the opinion or the actions of others. Therefore I delete everything which I don’t know how it was created. That’s all what I want to tell everybody.