An upgrade from 42.2 worked amazingly well on the desktop server.
The notebook, my main business tool, had more apps, snapshots, caches, etc… The root partition (20 GB as suggested by 42.2) was so full the new install hadn’t enough room. The install failed, needing another 6 GB… I deleted what I could find in cache, temp, etc. The second install was short on space in the root partition by 200 kB.
Oddly, at that point the free space remaining on the partition declined every time I deleted something. Never figured that out. Moved to plan B.
From earlier experience with the full install process I know that I could edit the partitions in that process. Backup first, right? Relearned rsync, futzed with NFS shares, and permissions to mount the remote directory. That sorted, I started a backup of my user directory to a previous backup on a remote directory mounted in my /home directory (outside of my user). Had to interrupt after 5 hours. Returning, it seemed the -u or update option hadn’t worked (from the GUI grsync). So I started over in an empty directory. Over 100Base-T with a switch on the desktop, it took 13 hours to complete the backup. There must be a better way. And of course the migration preserved the /home partition so I didn’t have to restore it.
With some encouragement from a more experienced software person, I took the direct approach and edited the partitions. Saved the /home directory, on its own partition. Even expanded it by 100 GB. Which was a mistake because even though the display in gparted said there was 100 GB available, it was actually only 99.997 GB–the install failed because you can’t have overlapping partitions. Next time, back at the detailed disk partition editor, I saw that two partitions overlapped by 1 cylinder. Corrected that with an edit. To be sure, I added a guard band of unassigned cylinders. Moral: look at the exact count of cylinders assigned to each partition to avoid overlaps.
For 42.2 I had a small swap (4 GB) and the root partition (20 GB) first, followed by /home and then a spare 175 GB that I used as a storage closet.
What worked for 43.3 was:
- Delete root partition and add it to swap. It’s now 24 GB, which I may want to reduce later.
- Deleted partition holding the storage closet.
- Create new root partition at the top of the disk (75 GB, just to be sure about at least the next upgrade).
- Extend /home into the space remaining below root.
Install finished fine. Oh, happy day!