[conspire] successful install, at last

[paulz at ieee.org]

Over the last month, I initiated a series of emails regarding detailsof disk troubleshooting and setting up new systems. Below is asummary of what I have found. 

DISK TOOLS

Seagate and WesternDigital have free disk diagnostic tools. 

WD is an executablethat runs under Windows. It recognizes and will run diagnostics onother brands of disks, including those mounted on USB. I only used it toread the SMART results. 

Seagate has asimilar tool. Apparently it requires rebooting Windows before it willrun. Then it keeps running in the background as a monitor. 

Seagate also has abootable USB tool. It is a version of Linux that will copy files. Nodiagnostics. IMHO, CABAL people would be better served with a liveUSB of a Linux that includes a partition editor, Some of the newerversions of gnome and KDE partition manager tools will access theSMART diagnostics. Store that USB in a safe place. 

BTW, it is possibleto completely copy and restore a full disk, including windows OS,with just fdisk and dd. Years ago, I found a URL with all of thesteps and did it. I am glad I made my own annotated notes becausethat website no longer exists. The full step by step is 2 page long. 

DISTROS AND APS

Earlier in the year,I wanted to install a particular ap (openscad). It was in debian sid,but not buster. Gee, I was using testing thinking I would get newerversions of aps. Obviously not correct assumption.


So before I did aninstall on my new laptop, I looked at available packages. Quite afew, including gnucash (accounting program) and kicad (PC layoutprogram sponsored in part by CERN) were also missing from testing.The versions in stable were quite old. Meanwhile, ubuntu is based onstable, but has much newer versions of the aps I wanted. 

DESKTOPS 

A previous emaildiscussed RAM and desktops. A little web searching revealed:

* Gnome is touted asbeing the most fancy and up to date, but you should have 4GB of RAM. 

* KDE is “lessfancy”, but only requires 2 GB. 

* LX is described asminimal and not shiny for systems with 1GB or less. 

I have been usingLXDE for some time. It generally lets me find the aps I use. Iupgraded to 20 GB RAM, but will still use LX. The most common linux forraspberry pi also uses lxde, so I have a consistent environment

INSTALL CHALLENGES

So I downloaded andtried the live lubuntu. Seemed ok, so I proceeded to do an install.To be on the safe side, I did the install on a USB SSD. I’ll get tothe internal drive when I am satisfied. 

Naturally thelubuntu install is not the same as the debian installer I have used anumber of times. The one place that took many tries was the diskpartitioning. I selected the appropriate drive, but it would not do adefault install. It was not very helpful. Sometimes, just beforecommitting to reformat, it pointed to something I needed to go back and fix. Othertimes, it completed the install, but the install would boot. Somedetails:

* need to explicitly create 500MB partition for grub or EFI. 

* need to set bootand esp flags from a pull-down menu. 

* But the installerdid not actually set the flags,I had to go back to the live disk anduse the disk partition tool to set the flags. 

* The originalinternal HD was formatted GPT, but the BIOS would only recognize USBwith the old (msdos) partition table. 

* After trying mostof the wrong combinations of the above,finally got it. 

BTW, lubuntu 18-10uses LXQt instead of LXDE. The biggest difference I found regardedthe applications menu. After I had installed many packages, severalwere not to be found in the menu. I could not find a version of lxmedto manually add them. To my relief, I found that the menu was updatedafter a reboot. 

SWAP SPACE

As part of settingup partitions, I naturally recalled the need for a swap partition.Maybe this was not necessary. After more web searching, here is myunderstanding. 

Long ago, the fulllinux kernel and associated functions was much bigger than the totalRAM. Swap was used to more efficiently save and reload pieces thatwere not needed at the moment. The usual recommendation was allocate aswap space twice the size of RAM. Now well into the 21stcentury, the linux OS has grown to more than a GB, but most computersmuch bigger RAM. With 2GB of RAM, swap is possibly not needed.Depending on your usage. For example, if that includes handling really big files,a big swap partition could help performance. 



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