kallistii | Displacing spinning rust (Reply)

(originally posted June 16 on Faceplant)
Well, that was a few hours out of my life I would love to have back...my system was acting up...I am sure it was my own fault, but it finally got to the point where I needed to do something. It was doing weird stuff like taking forever to close down or start up...which I traced to improperly setting up the drive/partition mounts parameters, and it would wait until it timed out before going to the next one, which was wrong as well...and so on. The other weird thing was that every once in a while, Konsole (KDE's command-line program) would flip upside down, and it took a lot of fiddling to reverse that. So I decided it is time to re-install Manjaro.

I keep the home directory on a separate drive & partition, and as I moved from Ubuntu KDE (Kubuntu), to Mint, and now 4 revisions of Manjaro, I kept the same home directory. This is, I think, a big part of the problem. I am sure some funky KDE parameters from Kubuntu just didn't sit well with the latest version of Manjaro. My current system had 3 operating systems, 6 drives (3 SSDs and 3 spinning rust) with a total of 26 partitions.

I decide to really re-do the Linux side of things...so only one Distro, Manjaro, and that meant cleaning off the two Linux SSD drives and using them as root and home, moving home from the spinning rust drive to the second SSD.

Big project.It took 3 tries to get it to work...first time it wouldn't install the Grub, and failed. So I had to re-arrange the UEFI boot order...carefully, so Windows will still boot. The second time it barfed on the partitioning...for some unknown reason, (I could guess, but I am griping here), the installer wants to check every partition to see what it is and then looks at the windows partitions to see if they are clean, and then if they are, if they can be resized/shrunk for use of a new Linux partition...you can guess with 26 partitions this can take a while! It was dying during that...I think it was running out of memory. I do have 16 Gig. I tried unplugging the external drives...and that finally got the install to work!

I started the project around 6 pm...it is now 2 am the next day.

Now I am doing the post install work of adding the packages I use that are not part of the defaults, like the JOE/JStar editor, Midnight Commander, etc. But this time I am taking notes of which ones I install so that, in theory, the next time I do this, and can create a script to automatically install my "usual" additions. The initial list is just a text file for now. I am also looking at using a tool called Obsidian, which is a meta-Wiki-like note-taking and information organization app. It reminds me a bit of Hypercard...

Sooo...I have to finish up things, copy over what I need from the old home directory...I don't need the many gig Download directory, for example, that can stay on the spinning rust. Add a few cosmetic things like wallpapers and such, at which point I should be finished...except for the things I forget to do...

And then, in theory, I rest. (and I did)