Hi all,

Just want to report a successful install of a basic ASCII system on a
Dell Vostro 3360, followed by an equally successful upgrade to Beowulf.

My Vostro was a bit odd in that it has a 32GB SSD as /dev/sdb and a
500GB HDD as /dev/sda. The BIOS only lets one boot from /dev/sda.
That notwithstanding, I put / on /dev/sdb :-) As long as you take care
to install GRUB in the MBR of /dev/sda that works fine.

My only gripe about the ASCII installer was that it let me select an
init system that was not included in the netinst image that I used.
I prefer to do air-gapped installs and set up the network afterwards
(once I have a deny-all packet filter going) so there was no way for
the installer to go fetch openrc :-/

# Not really a gripe but something to be aware of, if you forego the
# setting of a root password, you will be able to use sudo to elevate
# your privileges for maintenance work but you will *not* be able to
# boot in recovery mode :-o

With the ASCII base system installed, I apt-mark'd all packages as
automatically installed, told APT to auto-remove any packages that
were merely recommended or suggested (and to not bother installing
any of those in the future). Then I apt-mark'd a few packages that
I really need/want as manually installed and `apt auto-remove`d.

In terms of APT configuration settings, that looks like

APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant "false";
APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant "false";
APT::Install-Suggests "false";
APT::Install-Recommends "false";
APT::Get::AutomaticRemove "true";
APT::Get::Purge "true";

Mind you, this is not exactly for the faint of heart.

Following that, I set up networking and APT sources to point to beowulf
and upgraded. Worked like a charm.

I have since installed task-xfce-desktop, pared that down to a minimal
set of manually installed packages and am now trying to figure out
what's needed to allow the logged in desktop user to shutdown/reboot.
There has been a fair bit of change in this area in the last couple of
months and I am much confused as to where beowulf is heading in terms of
display manager (slim? lightdm?) and policy management solution of
choice (consolekit? polkit? elogin?). Hints welcome in the mean time.

# For the time being at least, I'm using slim (w/ xscreensaver, way too
# retro these days ;-) and seem to be using polkit with elogind. There
# are no consolekit packages on my system.
# Wait! I just noticed libck-connector0.
# Hmm, I see I have libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0 installed but no
# libpolkit-backend-elogind-1-0. Is that a/the problem?

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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