[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday May 5, 2019

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronco36 (aaronco36 at SDF.ORG):

> As an aside related to NomadBSD (for those interested in such
> asides), the name "Nomad" reminds me of the destructive robot/probe
> of the selfsame name in the original StarTrek episode "The
> Changeling" over 51 1/2 years ago.  I am still able to remember
> Captain James Kirk's usage of a potent variant of the classic
> Epimenides Paradox to cause "Nomad" to self-destruct in that
> episode's ending scene.

Much later (1979), when 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' came out with
essentially the same plot (except with V'ger instead of Nomad), the wags
assigned said flick the nickname 'Where Nomad Has Gone Before'.

(It was also so static and filled with overlong bits of nothing much
happening that the wags likewise dubbed it 'Star Trek: The Motionless
Picture'.)


> While it's great that the one member in particular is happy with the
> popular MX Linux, I myself have these two main concerns with MX
> Linux:
> a. MX Linux's gparted formatting tool seems to find and leave gaps
> in hard drive partitions that were previously formatted very tightly
> -- without these gaps -- using other distros' formatting tools;
> tools such as fdisk and gparted.

So, don't do your partitioning in the distro.

I've always recommended finding a live (or non-live) distro whose
partitioning tools you like and trust and always using _that_ for 
the task, rather than any distro installer's partitioning tools.
Then, any inadequacies in the latter don't matter.  (Likewise, you 
can mkfs, there.)

After doing your partitioning in $TOOL_OF_CHOICE, you can boot the
distro installer and skip its partitioning routines, instead just
supplying mountpoints for existing partitions.  Done.