I’ve checked through the documentation, but didn’t see anything mentioned on this. I know that custom partitioning for Kalpa isn’t supported, based on the dev’s comments.
What’s the best way to deal with /home being a subvolume on a small 25GB partition? I’ve installed Kalpa on a 1TB NVME SSD and since only 25GB is allocated for /, the /home btrfs subvolume only gets to access that amount of space in the partition. I ended up entirely filling up /home (and therefore /) just by copying my documents over into /home/lazysuse/Documents. Meanwhile /var is 928.4GB and it seems like it would be more appropriate to store the home directory in there as a subvolume.
What’s the recommended workaround for this? The installer (Agama) only allows a custom configured /home to be ext4 and doesn’t let you create it as a btrfs subvolume. I’d really prefer to use btrfs throughout for storage efficiency of that 928.4GB that’s currently allocated to /var. I know the reason for this is due to MicroOS’s focus as a server product for container workloads, but in the context of Kalpa with a desktop focus, I think it would make more sense for /home to be placed in the partition hierarchy in a way that lets users use more of their SSD space.
For testing purposes, I’ve created /var/home (similar to how Fedora Atomic handles this), and then used usermod -m -d /var/home/username username.
As an alternative, would it be safe to remove the current /home subvol in /etc/fstab and replace it with a subvol that’s located at /var/home?
cd /var
sudo btrfs subvolume create home
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Change this:
/dev/mapper/cr_root /home btrfs subvol=/@/home 0 0
to this:
/dev/mapper/cr_var /home btrfs subvol=@/home 0 0
Are there any longtime consequences for doing this?
Sorry small typo in the above (couldn’t edit the post):
/dev/mapper/cr_var /home btrfs subvol=home 0 0
I found out a bit more after looking at the MicroOS documentation.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:BTRFS#Default_Subvolumes
I think it’s probably going to be preferable for me to proceed with mapping /home manually in /etc/fstab after all. I don’t see anything there that indicates that this will cause problems in future. Either that or just remove the /home line item in fstab and use a plain ol’ directory in /var and use /var/home as the default location for user homes. I’m not managing multiple users on this system, so it won’t be a problem.
If you’re using agama to install Kalpa right now, that’s completely unsupported, and I’m not surprised it’s causing you issues.
https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/openSUSE-MicroOS-DVD-x86_64-Current.iso is the only supported installation media, as documented @ Documentation | Kalpa Desktop
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Thanks sfalken. I could’ve sworn I went to grab the MicroOS ISO and was only offered an ISO that included Agama, but I must be mistaken. I’ve got so many ISOs saved that it wouldn’t surprise me to have got them mixed up.
Is the Kalpa option in Agama purely for testing reasons and to prepare for a fully supported inclusion in future?
it’s an artifact that shouldn’t be there, as it results in broken installations, I’ve just been travelling and haven’t gotten around to fixing it.
I can confirm using the MicroOS ISO that uses the YaST based installer was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
I know now what happened. I have a short attention span and bad short term memory which is not a great combo. I was testing Leap 16 which only offers Agama based installation and ended up using that installer for testing Kalpa later.
The installation of Kalpa worked fine from Agama, but the partition layout it gives you isn’t suitable for general desktop use.