I’m trying to install Leap 16 on a system with existing partitions that I want to keep. I have a GPT-formatted disk with two partitions, an EFI System Partition and an LVM partition (no encryption). The LVM partition contains a volume group with several volumes including root, home, and some data volumes. I cannot find a way in the Agama installer to have it import the existing partitions/volume group, format the EFI and root partitions, and keep/mount the others. I also haven’t found much documentation, either (I assume that will come with time).
This was very easy in YaST and I have several systems with this configuration that I may want to install fresh instead of doing an in-place upgrade. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction…
Yes, still WIP it would seem. You could probably need to do this this by dropping to a CLI with Ctrl+Alt+F2. Not for novices, and make sure any important data is backed up first…
Activate the volume groups… vgchange -ay
Using your existing volume group name (represented as VG_NAME), format the root LV… mkfs.ext4 /dev/<VG_NAME>/root
then mount it mount /dev/<VG_NAME>/root /mnt
Mount any other LVs eg “home” and “data” mkdir -p /mnt/home /mnt/data mount /dev/<VG_NAME>/home /mnt/home mount /dev/<VG_NAME>/data /mnt/data
Mount the EFI partition mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot/efi # Replace /dev/sdX1 with actual EFI partition device
Verify the mounts with lsblk -f
Now it should be ready for the Agama graphical installer. Only the root partition is formatted and your other LVs remain intact.
I tried to do those steps, but, unfortunately, once I have everything mounted, the Agama installer then doesn’t find any devices available for installation. I was able to make it find the EFI partition, but I think one of the hang ups is that when you select the device, then go to details and configure partition, it won’t let you pick a PV as it expects a mount point and you aren’t mounting the PV.
I’ve attached a couple of screen shots.
I have to say, I’ve used SUSE/openSUSE for a long time, and, for a major release, this is majorly disappointing after being “spoiled” by YaST’s capabilities. I much appreciate all of the effort being put in upgrading the installer, but (IMHO) this was not ready to be included in a release.
Thanks fro the update. I had hoped that it might get around Agama’s current limitation of coping with existing LVMs, but unfortunately it doesn’t recognize them as valid installation targets.
I have to agree with you on this point. Slowroll might be a better option for your use case?
Until 15.6 Yast installer has the option to keep the same partitioning by reading the old /etc/fstab in root filesystem, even mixed with LVM and LUKS encryption.
If you install and use the opensuse-migration-tool, that issue won’t exist. That said, it cannot handle 3rd party repositories. For the rest it takes care of all the system changes that came with Leap 16 as a major release. In case you did not disable btrfs snapshots, you can even rollback to 15.6 if 16.0 has issues after the upgrade.
After installing 16.0 in a new machine (needed to set the nomodeset flag) and creating a separate /home partition I wondered how (in a future version) I would be able to import those. I could not find an obvious option to do so. It is a bit of a shock to read that there is no way of doing so like in Yast. Is this likely to change anytime soon?
Many thanks.
OK, let me rewrite the phrase:
It’s very restrictive that Agama, the shiny new installer, with all their bells and whistles, didn’t support this useful feature. It also cannot encrypt a partition and use it for LVM, it cannot create a separate filesystem for /home, and a lot of other features that i will not mention here because they are not about Storage…
I hear you. Agama is still under active development, so it’s only a matter of time before it gains better handling of existing LVMs and more flexible partitioning options.
Meanwhile, as As knurpht mentioned, the opensuse-migration-tool is a good choice if you want to upgrade and keep your existing LVM and partition layout intact.
I did end up trying that, and it did work fine (as far as I can tell so far). I was surprised that it didn’t ask for a final confirmation before proceeding, and it didn’t ask to switch me to SELinux, which I was expecting. It also warns that it’s not for production use… Anyway, those are other issues. The main thing related to this thread is that using the upgrade tool doesn’t give you the chance to start “clean” to get rid of old cruft like stale packages, config files, etc. and get back to an OOTB, refreshed, current configuration state.
Sure, I used it in a couple of cases with success, and tried also in this case but didn’t work because the machine is behind a ssl inspection proxy, and the certificate does not validate (I don’t want to add trust in the proxy CA, the tool doesn’t have an “–insecure” option, and I didn’t have time to try to add it myself and see if it works), so I tried the offline upgrade. No luck for now. There are a few months of support ahead, so I delayed the upgrade.
Interesting to see that Agama is still having issues with installs that aren’t “use whole disk,” as when I was trying to use it to install into my new homebuilt back in June the Agama team was responsive to reports of issues on their, is it github?? forum . . . . Seemingly all was going to be fixed in days or weeks.
I have posted here before that my workaround was to get the then still available Leap 15.6 installer, in my case I wanted separate / and /home directories, which Agama wasn’t able to do . . . installed as 15.6 and then edited the repos to “16” and ran a zypper dup . . . .
IMHO either Leap or TW would be the choice for a fresh system install . . . .
@non_space just a matter of working through the drop downs. No separate home is ideal for those that want FDE (which it seems is the flavor of the day).
Well, I wasn’t posting for me . . . posting for OP or others who hit functionality issues with Agama . . . and how I worked around it back then . . . . In looking at another post about I did see hui’s post detailing the “drop down menus” to work through, so perhaps the basic installing into partitions or making them to then install into might be solved . . . ???
But, perhaps for others not. Even in your case you say “I am waiting to go to 16” . . . but then you could get there from 15.6, no??
You can certainly do the migration, but, reading the release notes again, there are several changes that might make you want to do a clean start, such at network interface naming, default configuration file locations, etc.
