OK, so I finally got my filing system tidied up and decluttered, and backed
up (rsync to an SD card). I have a boot USB with an image of Flidas on it
(copied directly with dd), and I'm writing this from a live session using
that now. I'm feeling like a lite hacker (like a leet hacker but not quite as
impressive), and I'm ready to try out installing Flidas on Bishop, my trusty
old digital carrier pigeon. Yay!
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/bishop
I have my preferred partition scheme in place (see link above), so what I'm
wanting to do is install Flidas to my secondary testing OS partition, ideally
leaving me with a working Belenos system if anything goes wrong. But the
first time I ran the graphical installer, the tick boxes for 'Encrypt the new
installation' and 'use LVM' were both ticked and greyed out.
Oh no! I don't want to make any changes to my user files partition, and I
*definitely* don't want any LVM right now, thank you. So I rebooted and tried
the text install, but it got as far as try to download files from the nearest
mirror in Taiwan, and then did nothing for about 10 minutes, so I rebooted
again.
I decided to experiment with installing to a USB stick, not a live system
like this one, but an installed system that can be updated and store user
config. This is something I've always been curious about. So I booted back
into the live system, put in an 8GB USB 2.0 stick (my Belenos and Uruk
installs have never been more than about 5 GB so this ought to be enough) and
launched the installer again.
As I clicked through, the installer asked me if I wanted it to unmount
partitions on sdac, to which I agreed. Then, what do you know, this time the
tick boxes are *not* greyed out, and I can untick them. So on with
partitioning. The next question is, what is the best file system format to
use for an installed system on a USB?
A quick web search turned up many options; ext4? btrfs? f2fs? After skimming
over a few pages ...
https://askubuntu.com/questions/220015/how-to-use-btrfs-with-compression-on-external-usb-hard-drive
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick#Prerequisites
... I decided that since I'm just experimenting, it's fine to just go with
ext4 for now. Any useful links about the pros and cons of different file
system formats on both USB drives and internal SSDs would be most
appreciated.
I set up my partition scheme with two swap partitions because I read
somewhere (probably in some old outdated Debian docs on the web) that using
the same one for multiple installs can cause problems. I used to be able to
specify which swap partition I wanted to use for each installed OS, but it
now seem to automatically select both to be formatted. But I've been told in
other threads here that this no longer matters (if it ever did). So I'll
probably delete that second swap partition, and give the space back to my
/home partition.
I'll post this now and then go on with the install. I'll update with the
outcome in later comments.
