House Keeping Tips for Debian

Yes, I meant I had Debian the other day it mentioned some of my things weren’t recognised. I can remember the exact wording now, during the install. I didn’t find that too hard, the install I mean and liked everything I saw apart from the no printer. Wifi worked and everything else did. I don’t mind trying to get the printer sorted just couldn’t see how or where to do so. That could be my lack of experience.

As I use Mint which is based on Ubuntu and Debian I have been trying to learn them so as I understand the base

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this was part of why i added a debian partition as well. trying to understand how some of the pieces fit together. one of the reasons i settled on bodhi linux instead of sticking with ubuntu mate was because it requires a little more of what @anon56357095 calls fettling. not everything is overly self-explanatory which forced me to learn some of the inner workings :slight_smile:

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A good Lancashire term if ever there was from the lad, which some might understand. My lass uses it all the time. Think I might have another go and see if I can’t make more sense of if I do it for longer

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That’s the problem. CSM is meant to help with compatibility and stuff. Problem is, in reality it usually makes everything boot in BIOS mode and ignores UEFI, at least from all the experience I gathered with UEFI, to date.

Are you sure? I can’t imagine it is not toggable if it says Legacy first, UEFI second

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Hi cordx,

If you want to do your future installs using UEFI mode, you may experience problems with the BIOS, as your previous installs have used the BOTH setting, with the CSM loading either UEFI first or Legacy only.

This practice stems from the days of Windoze 7 and its crossover to UEFI and secure boot. I had a budget 2013 AMD A8 Tower (purchased via Amazon), the seller thinking was doing me a favour installed Windoze 7 without a licence. Did me a disservice, as it came to haunt me later.

The short version of a long story, it corrupted the UEFI capsule, but was able use UEFI first via CSM. I was also able to format my disks to GPT, so had a hybrid UEFI.

Depending on the age and type of your laptop, you may be able to use UEFI.?

Example
I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad 420 (Intel second gen specs) and repaired it for a friend to use. Because it had been set to BOTH and had a fresh install of W7, I flashed the BIOS and this repaired the UEFI capsule. But the UEFI capsule soon became corrupted and I had to reinstall and set thet BIOS to Legacy for it to function.

:sunglasses:

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Could you explain further?

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Hi ElectricDandySlider

If you don’t mind the extra effort of (a Debian install), with its post install fettling, check the website of your printer and see what drivers are available for your make and model. They offer a shell script or have .deb file which be installed using the gDebi tool.

Or a quicker way to learn the basic ropes of Debian is to use LMDE 3 Cinnamon: https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php so you the benefit of Debian and friendliness of Linuxmint.

:sunglasses:

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While doing the final shake down tests (something I do with all my rebuilds) I install various OS’es, test and wipe. Repeat. If it survives, I’m content, job’s a good un.

During the fourth attempt I could not remove the UEFI entry via the sudo efibootmgr -b 0000 -B, command, it was removed but upon rebooting the machine, it reappeared, as did the second entry.

Striped machine and erased the harddrive with dd, clean all components again and reassemble. Load USB LiveCD image and found the UEFI entries for test 2 & 3 were still present. The fourth and fifth install were permanently etched into the UEFI log and could not be deleted.

The machine functioned, but had corrupted UEFI capsule. Spoke to my local Godlike M$ tech, and he wanted to run a mile rather than attempt a repair. I found alleged repair kits, bit no independent reviews or mentions at various Linux forums. If any one had been successful or not.

The 420 Thinkpad still functions and performs nicely in Legacy mode, two years later.

:sunglasses:

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Thanks @anon56357095, I might have that on a disk somewhere if not I do the down load and give it a look. The one I tried was 9.7.

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As of today it is 9.8, when I updated my lappy earlier this evening.

LMDE 3 is a good learning curve, if you can afford the time and effort fully load a Debian install, the relief that you managed it, is satisfaction in it self. I had to trawl the forums and glean small titbits here and there, or wadding through their various long winded manuals.

:sunglasses:

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i am fairly certain. i don’t spend much time tinkering with uefi settings so it is possible there is a method of changing it that i am not aware of. for the first two it was as simple as using the up or down arrow to choose the entry and enter brought up a set of choices. for csm, i could arrow up or down to the entry but there was no choice given in the same manner as the others.

i will keep this post in mind if the day comes when i try to make the switch. turns out my main machine is a T430s so i may well run into the exact scenario you are describing.

in the end, i don’t have to have gpt or straight uefi. i manage just fine with what i have. i had wanted to split my 3rd partition where debian lives (swap on 4th) to add mx linux and that is how i finally realized the disc was mbr, but eventually i figured out i could add distros to my external in the space not used by timeshift and mx (as well as lubuntu) landed there :slight_smile:

i can even say that i found a bit of debian that i hope to bring to my two unbuntu partitions. last year using ubuntu’s 16.04 base my bodhi partition was capable of going into hibernate. this year something changed with 18.04 and choosing hibernate just goes straight to shutdown. the few times i have done a search for a fix, it doesn’t seem like much is involved, but i was impressed that debian (9.5 was what i installed, but it might be 9.8 by now as mack mentioned earlier) was able to hibernate without any further fettling.

If you do experience issues when attempting to switch to UEFI, and have to fallback to Legacy, use the Extended & Logical Volume Partitions.

It will require you to use a separate boot partition @ 500MB in size (as you have maintain it by removing surplus older kernels), then create an Extended Partition using the entire Hard Drive (if using SSD, do not forget to allow for overprovisioning, @ 10% of disk space, is free of formatting).

Within this one extended partition you are able to create up 60ish logical volume partitions, to install any combination of distro that takes your fancy, using a common swap and Data partition.

Example of 500GB HDD, formatted as 500MB /boot, / distro of choice 10x 15Gb, /swap, requires 160Gb (assuming you have 8GB of ram) of disk space and the Data partition symlinked to your chosen distro taking the rest of the disk.

Should you go for multiple OS’es, they are all competing for the same boot space, you may need to extend the size of the boot partition accordingly.

:sunglasses:

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Important UEFI/LEGACY notice.

Do not attempt to change to UEFI if you have installed in Legacy Mode using MBR or vice-versa.

GPT and MBR partition tables do NOT mix. This will either make your computer unbootable or corrupt the file system.

UEFI & GPT partition table work together.

Legacy & MBR partition tables work together.

:sunglasses:

Edit typo 13.03hrs 17/02/19

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that’s part of the reason i didn’t want to do too much poking around while looking at the csm setting the other day. i appreciate this post and the preceding one about using an extended volume. i may try that one day. truth be told, i have enough to play around with looking after the three distros on this internal hdd and the two that i rarely visit on the external drive.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: House Keeping in Linux

this one took a little more work during my recent (first uefi) installation. the couple of times i tried to dd my iso onto a usb even with gpt predefined, it was not uefi enabled. i found the link below helpful.

the first two steps were to use gparted to make sure the usb had a gpt and was formatted as fat32. after that i followed the instructions about how to write the iso to the usb using the terminal. this was the command i used: 7z x name-of-iso.iso -o/media/$USER/usb_label. the link below also includes instructions about how to write the usb in a (probably older, but possibly still helpful/relevant) version of ubuntu and windows.

after that i booted into my uefi/bios settings and changed the boot options to uefi only (which allowed me to turn csm off). another reboot later i was able to choose the usb and there was an indication in the alternate boot choice as well as the distro loading screen that i was booting in uefi mode.

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I just “rediscovered” a nifty site that can generate a sources.list for you :

Hasn’t been updated for Buster being “stable” - but handy for those still running Wheezy, Jessie or Stretch


Also - welcome to stable Buster!!!

I sometimes use debgen.xyz

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