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installing debian on mandriva box


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well, 6 months after my "rolling distros" thread, I'm finally going to do something. I've d/l the 3 debian testing CDs a couple nights ago, and am now ready to install it on my mandriva box. Six months ago I was intending to try out a rolling distro by installing one on my win2k box, but I changed my mind. I have backed the important stuff in /home, so I'm not really paranoid about screwing up mandriva by installing debian.

 

Here's what df shows:

Filesystem			Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2			  16G  3.7G   11G  25% /
/dev/hda5			 168G   77G   91G  46% /home

 

When I install debian, I want it to use, say 80 GB out of the 91GB available. I'm not sure if debian will consider this space "available", it probably won't.

 

any tips or pointers appreciated. I suppose that since I have what I need backed up already, I can just let debain testing have the whole drive. I'd prefer to keep mandriva though.

 

edit: after reading arctic's review of debian etch a few days ago, I decided to grab it and try it out. Great review arctic.

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With your current partition layout you will be overwriting whatever is installed there. Otherwise, you have to resize /home and make it smaller, so that there is hard disk space free, and create additional partitions to install Debian into. You cannot use the existing /home for installing a distro into. Or maybe you could, but it would be a very big mistake, and not the right way to do things.

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Question: do you want to reuse the same /home partition from both systems? Have the same home directory in both Mandriva and Debian I mean?

 

If so, there's no way you need to give up 80 GB for Debian, you can see that Mandriva is more than happy with just 16 GB. I would suggest you make room for 10 GB for Debian's / and if you want to be fancy set aside another 3 GB or so for a /swap.

 

One way to do this would be to boot a live CD and use qtparted (or similar) to shrink your /home partition by the amount you want. Obviously as you say you'll have backed up everything important before you do this. This partition shrinkage is probably a lot easier to do from a live CD than from within your installed Mandriva.

 

Then during the Debian install it should (I'm guessing because I've never installed Debian but Mandriva gives you the option) ask you whether to install itself into existing partition(s), wipe out everything, or just use the available, non-partitioned, free space on the drive. That should let you divide up the partitions as you want as part of the install.

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I will add my two cents:

 

My approach would be to boot Mandriva and log in as root. Then start the MCC. Unmount the /home partition and resize it with the draktools. Free some 10 GB. More than enough (a basic Desktop install of Debian uses 2.7 GB). Then create a new ext3 partition at the end of your drive with the freed up space. After that, reboot and start the Debian installation. You can happily share Mandrivas /swap and /home with Debian. Just create a different user, e.g. if Mandriva has /home/bob, create for Debian /home/bobby or something like that (whatever you like).

 

Some tips from my side: Xorg was a bit buggy after the pre-last update on the install media. Although it was able to install and configure most things, it failed to detect monitor refresh rates on many computers. Today, a bugfix was launched, so if you do a netinstall (lasts about 1-2 hours), you will automatically get the fixed package. If your media is older, you might need to add the refresh rates manually, e.g. using nano. Just write down the refresh rates from your Mandriva xorg.conf file and add them to the Debian xorg.conf file and everything should work.

 

Also remember that X is now modular, thus you might need to install some modules (if X fails to starts and complains about modules, you will get some info which modules are missin. a "apt-cache search xserver-xorg | less" will list the options and tell you the exact name of the package you might need.).

 

Oh, the grub problem I reported in the review is solved. ;)

 

If you run into any problems, just ask. And remember that if your bootloader installation should fail (very unlikely), you can always restore Mandrivas bootloader with the 1st Mandriva CD.

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Question: do you want to reuse the same /home partition from both systems? Have the same home directory in both Mandriva and Debian I mean?

that would be great.

You can happily share Mandrivas /swap and /home with Debian.

wow, wasn't sure about that. I remember some old threads around here about sharing one home with multiple distros...

 

arctic: I downloaded the 3 debian testing CDs on 12/29 and 12/30... should I use these, or do the net install to get some fixes?

 

Will I have duplicate programs after both distros are on? I mean, will there be a firefox in mandriva, and another firefox in debian, etc? I am doing this so that I can continually roll forward and get newer packages, such as firefox, and all the other major ones, with debian, rather than be stuck with old stuff in mandriva 2006.

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Try the install media you have. I think it should be free of the x-bug that was around 3rd of January.

 

Will I have duplicate programs after both distros are on?

Well, both distros will be completely separate entities. Only the /home partition will be shared. But that does not mean that Mandriva will/can use Debians packages and vice versa. If you boot into Debian and run the Debian user account, then you will use only Debians Firefox package etc., not the Mandriva packages. But remember that you will need to different user accounts on the /home partition, one for Mandriva (bob1) and one for Debian (bob2). Otherwise (=both using bob1), the config files can be pretty borked, shutting you out of the useraccount. :P

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I just did what arctic suggested above, about using mcc and draktools to resize the /home. Worked great, and was very easy.... I'm flabbergasted. The things I don't know...!

 

now df shows this:

Filesystem			Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2			  16G  3.7G   11G  25% /
/dev/hda5			 158G   77G   82G  49% /home

so I have around 10GB unused now.

 

How'd you know my name was Bob? lol, just kidding...!

 

If I like debian and get used to it, I'll probably make the whole box debian sometime later.

 

If I get to a part of the install where I don't know what to put, I'll come back here using my other machine and ask. It's 6:30 in the evening here, what's it where you are arctic?

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Question: do you want to reuse the same /home partition from both systems? Have the same home directory in both Mandriva and Debian I mean?

that would be great.

You can happily share Mandrivas /swap and /home with Debian.

wow, wasn't sure about that. I remember some old threads around here about sharing one home with multiple distros...

 

arctic: I downloaded the 3 debian testing CDs on 12/29 and 12/30... should I use these, or do the net install to get some fixes?

 

Will I have duplicate programs after both distros are on? I mean, will there be a firefox in mandriva, and another firefox in debian, etc? I am doing this so that I can continually roll forward and get newer packages, such as firefox, and all the other major ones, with debian, rather than be stuck with old stuff in mandriva 2006.

In internet cafe now so short answer....

Share /swap, its unformatted space but /home you need t6o think about... it can be done BUT.... it needs planning same KDE/Gnome etc. or you can redirect using links but it still needs thinking about before you do it.... OR use different user!

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Also, you have to ensure that the uid and gid that the user in Mandriva has, is the same in Debian. Else, when you switch from one distro to another, the files in your home directory will be owned by different uid/gid and be inaccessible.

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My approach would be to boot Mandriva and log in as root.
I didn't know how to do this, that's why I didn't suggest it! :P I know it's been discussed many times why it's a bad idea to always log in to the desktop as root, but actually I'm not sure how to - do you have to enable it somehow or can you just type in "root" as the username (root doesn't appear on the list I'm shown at login). And if one were to do that, does the home directory of the user then become /root rather than /home/root? Which is how you're then able to unmount the home partition without upsetting the system?
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yes, you just type in "root" for the user name, and then the password at the kde log in...

 

and when kde comes up, its a weird red background color, and a warning pops up telling you "you're logged in as root, hope you know what you are doing" or something like that.

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