On 10/21/24 09:16, Haines Brown via Dng wrote:

>
> When I boot Devuan-live it does not indicate whether it is for BIOS
> or UEFI. Does the current installer still indicate that?

With the live isos, you can tell by looking at the boot menu. UEFI uses
grub and the footnote says to press "e" to edit the menu. Legacy BIOS
boots with isolinux, and the footnote says to use TAB to edit the menu.


>
> When I run the installer, I'm told that it sees an EFI partition on
> both SSDs. Booting from the first is normal. Is this recommendation or
> a recommndation of wha tis normal? I tried both efi partitions but
> still end up with grub>.

I'm pretty sure you have to use the one on the first hard drive. You could
use the one on the second hard drive if you know you're going to switch to
the first position after installing.

> I choose default installation options.
>
> I suspect as you suggest that my problem is with partitiong, I chose
> gdisk to partition. I tell the partitioner to partition /dev/nvme1n1,
> my new SSD. I have a lot of partitions, but here is the partiion
> number, purpose, size and type of the first four plus swa:
>

>          1 boot   5G 8300
>          2 efi  550M EF00
>          3 root  20G 8303
>          4 home 300G 8302
>          ...
>          11 swap 30G 8200

>
> I'm told that /home will not be broken out, but that is what I want.
>

You have to tell the installer which partition to use for /home. I still
don't know whether you're using the graphical or the cli installer. The
graphical installer has an options window near the beginning of the
install. You need to check the box that says to use a separate /home
partition.

If you're using the cli installer, it will ask you to type in the
partition to use for /home or leave it blank if you don't want a separate
/home partition.



> I wrote the partition table, but install options seemed to indicate
> that partition formatting was automatic. Should I have used the
> terminal to format the partitions?

It looks like you didn't get my previous reply. The installer does not
create partitions, but it does give you the opportunity to run a
partitioner during the install. Those include gparted, cfdisk and gdisk.
If you create your partitions before running the installer, you can skip
this step.

The installer will format the partitions unless you tell it not to. Again,
that's a checkbox in the options window for the graphical installer and a
config file option for the cli installer.

>
> How does the installer know in which partition to put files? For
> example, how doed it know to put user's account into partition 4?

See above regarding Options window. Maybe read the Help in the installer,
too.

>
> I presume it uses dd to copy them because no partition is mounted as
> far as I know. Are the partitions somehow mounted?

Yes, the installer mounts and unmounts the partitions. It uses rsync to
copy the running live system. Consequently, any changes you make in the
live system get copied into the install system. (e.g. like if you change
the background image or even install a package.)

>
> For some reason installation see the swap partion I just created and asks if I want to
> use a swap ñfile instead. I say yes, although I worry that it can't seen.

I would need to see the error log to figure this out. It should have seen
the swap.

>
> I'm asked if the target partition is /dev/nvme1n1p3, the intended partition.
> I say y(es). Why is N(o) option preferred? Makes no sense to me unless it is
> merey a precaution.

Help me out and tell me where you are in the installation at this point. I
can't tell, and I'm the one who wrote it.

fsmithred