[Arm-netbook] OpenPOWER virtual coffee continues every Tuesday UTC 22:00

[Philip Hands]

Alain D D Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 01:49:25PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
>
>> If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and 
>> install mate as a package.
>> Mate is not the default desktop, but it is available.
>
> I would like LVM on top of Raid-1 (MDADM). I have tried hard, the Linux mint
> installer only does LVM if you give it the whole disk. I mirrored 2 disks by
> hand, and am installing on top of that - no LVM, so I shall throw it away once
> I see if it works.
>
> Next: try plain Debian.

If you want anything complicated regarding RAID/LVM, while it is
possible to do via debian-installer, it can be a bit of a pain,
especially if you end up needing to drop to a shell to do the twiddly
bits, given that the shell in d-i is busybox.

Instead, I'd recomend booting grml (a debian live image) which will then
a) prove Debian will run nicely on your hardware (given that grml is
very close to straight Debian), and give you a full OS with which to
configure your disks etc.:

  https://grml.org/

Look here for docs:

  https://grml.org/docs/

Reading this might help too:

  https://grml.org/grml-debootstrap/

> I might be forced back to Centos 8 & Xfce ... if that does LVM on top of raid -
> should do, it works in Centos 6 - but no guarantee.

LVM on MD is no problem at all with Debian -- personally I'd recomend
creating several partitions on the disks, and then RAID each pair of
partitions, and then add the resulting raids into LVM as PVs -- that way
you get more choices about what to do when later migrating to bigger
disks, or deciding that adding a third disk might be good, say.

> Thank goodness for virtual machines as play areas.

Definitely.

Cheers, Phil.
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