[conspire] Saturday , The grocery store trip plans to get something

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bruce Coston (jane_ikari at yahoo.com):

> Ugh , Friday already . If it's cabal. I plan on trying to build my
> remaster of exe GNU linux with trinity and have it in my laptop . 

It will indeed be a CABAL meeting!

A friend of mine is having a book-release party at Borderlands Bookstore
in S.F. at 3 PM, so I'm a little torn about this.  I'm tempted to get
everything set up in the morning and show up at CABAL about an hour
late, but am still pondering that.

> I don't plan on becoming an expert on reworking installs to have seperate 
> /boot partitions , the change I need .

You're sure you do?  That's a real question, as you have a great deal
more experience with multiboot configurations than I do.  Personally, I 
get a headache even thinking about that level of system complexity.  If 
I wanted to try out large numbers of alternate distros, perhaps I'd be
tempted to _either_ try them one at a time, blowing away n-1 in order to
try n, _or_ just use VM environments for that (VMware, VirtualBox,
whatever).

Back when I was fooling around with bootloaders, I always found it
really vital to understand the several stages the booting process went
through, and where each piece was loaded from. 

So, I would _think_ that a multiboot configuration would be least
confusing and most reliable if you maintained your boot menu and 
main boot components (e.g., first-stage bootloader) always from the
same primary distro installed in, say, /dev/sda1.  No matter if 
your newest distro installation were in /dev/sda12, you still would 
_not_ change/install/adjust any bootloader settings while installing 
the new distro into /dev/sda12.  Instead, you would skip the installer's
bootloader step, complete installation, and the reboot to your primary
distro in /dev/sda1, and only _then_ create a configuration item in GRUB
or whatever for your newest addition.


> Tonight I plan to install a hd. on the desktop and do some software 
> dumping before the remaster step . I should have the disc in the laptop 
> by cabal. Ideally someone knows how to change the remastered iso to allow 
> seperate partitions despite the original condition of " exe " .

You don't need to remaster the ISO.

What you do is:  Use your favourite partition maintenance disk to create
in advance the partitions you intend for Exe GNU/Linux to use.  You
might as well both lay out the partition definitions and also mkfs them.

Having done that, boot the Exe GNU/Linux installer, and proceed right to
the point where it normally offers to create its One Big Dumb Partition.
Select whichever partition you want to be '/', and (if you mkfs'ed
before) tell it not to format it.  Let the installer mount that
partition.  Switch to a virtual console (Ctrl Alt F2 or whatever) and
type 'mount' to see where the installer's RAMdisk has the target root
partition mounted.  

Go there.  Make mountpoint directories for whatever second, third, etc.
partitions are going to be mounted.  E.g., if the installer has
/dev/sda12 mounted as '/target/' then do 'mkdir /target/usr' to create
the place where your separate /dev/sda13 is going to be mounted as /usr
at runtime.  Now, mount that sucka, e.g., 'mount /dev/sda13 /target/usr'.

Switch back to your distro's (probably graphical) installer screen,
using Ctrl Alt F7 or whatever.  Proceed through the rest of
installation.  When it's done, you'll need to edit the file that will be
/etc/fstab (currently /target/etc/fstab, or whatever) to add an
appropriate line for subsequently mounting /dev/sda13 as /usr .  Done.


> I can't really find a better .deb with trinity built in  , using smxi 
> as a seperate thing should help with Rick's concerns about propriatery 
> software . 

{shrug}  If smxi works for you, good.  I am always leery of third-party
bolt-ons to administer my system

> [ One should still use caution Re. w32codecs etc. ] I'm wondering if  
> one can recover from ' In an installed system, enter in a root terminal: 
> partitionmounter.sh

You're referring to the installation instructions for Exe GNU/Linux,
right?  http://exe-linux.fastfishwebsolutions.com/installation.html

Well, all I can say is, either trust them to do the right thing or read
the script and everything it invokes really carefully.  ;->