MX USB Maker / minstall experience

[paul1149]

I finally bit the bullet and built a new tower to replace my faithful Vista-era C2D companion. This is a Ryzen 5 5600x, and probably has the power of all my previous towers - and there have been several - combined. It's almost like say a thing, and boom it's done. Even Web browsing is much faster, which surprised me.

I used MX USB Maker to clone my previous install, using the full-bore MX-only option. It worked super well. I'd like to report a few very minor snags, for what they may be worth.

• This is not the first time MXUSBM did not preserve my keyboard layout setting (US-Dvorak). It turns out it was stored but not invoked, so it was a simple task to bring them to the fore.
• Once up on the USB stick, I had to refresh my memory as to how to bring about an install. Perhaps minstall should have a desktop icon added?
• A serious point of confusion was that after creating a root and a home partition, the install process warned me that there was no place for grub to reside. So I went back and created a small partition, with the ext4 FS, for that purpose, and made it "Boot". But it was out of its natural order on the drive because I didn't want to redo my previous partitioning, and I wasn't sure grub would pick it up. Plus I erred and made it 2GB. From examining the partition, it is clear that grub did recognize it as its home. So I guess the lesson is to create a small Boot partition from the get-go.

Finally there was the chore of mounting my other internal drives/partitions. I hadn't thought of bringing a copy of my old fstab over to my home directory for reference, so it would be from scratch. But I think the drive UUIDs would be all new anyway, so they would have to be determined. But voila, enter Disk Manager. A simple click auto-mounted each drive in fstab, and the job was complete. This is a powerful tool.

Overall, a great experience. I appreciate the work of Team MX !

Be well.

[dolphin_oracle]

thanks for the comments. the installer icon on the desktop is one of the things we are tweaking for mx-21. also allowing the ~/Desktop folder to be localized

[figueroa]

In my opinion, the MX installer has become very difficult. I suggest that the direction be reversed to reflect what was in MX-18. Excessive hand-holding in the non-default selection presents to use with a confounding array of choices. Those who need or desire a custom disk layout will know what to do or be able to look it up as they go.

[paddys-hill]

I disagree, AFAIC it is perfectly simple.

However, it could do with:
a) a "Review Choices" step just before it starts formatting & writing over the existing root directory.
b) a clear choice to NOT overwrite /home that works! The current status is that if I am restoring from a USB Maker drive, even if I set it to leave /home alone it overwrites it, no matter where /home is located. Just lost 1 complete days work because I had to restore.
c) a clear choice to leave other partitions well and truly alone. (Although it doesn't touch these, it is not clear and I cannot tell it to leave them alone.)

JM20cW

[AK-47]

Could be some bugs you're seeing. What is concerning in this report:

1. No "Review choices" screen - there should be at least one confirmation prompt that occurs before the installer starts formatting, which gives you a summary of what will be done. If not, either you have it with --auto or there's something wrong.
2. You should be able to select the Preserve option from the format drop-down box, if the partition is formatted in a file system that is valid for the use of that partition.
3. It shouldn't do anything to other existing partitions if you do not select anything for their use case. If you want the installer to format the partition without using it for anything, select the Format option instead of the other uses.

About it warning you that there's no space for GRUB (I presume it's the BIOS-GRUB warning), are you using a disk with >2TB or are you trying to create more than 4 partitions?

Several bugs were fixed since you started this thread. First, try updating the installer by running in the live session:

Code: Select all

sudo apt update
sudo apt update mx-installer gazelle-installer-data-mx

Then if you still have these issues, can you please post the contents of the log file (/var/log/minstall.log)?

[paul1149]

About it warning you that there's no space for GRUB (I presume it's the BIOS-GRUB warning), are you using a disk with >2TB or are you trying to create more than 4 partitions?

I think this is in reference to my original post? The disk is a new 500GB, of which I was claiming about 300GB for this install, consisting only of the /root and home partitions. Then I added a Boot partition. The rest of the drive remains untouched as yet.