On Friday 16 March 2018 12:42:02 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
> Am Freitag, 16. M�rz 2018 schrieb William Morder:
> > [...]
> > Will this work for an i386 machine, as well? I did try installing Devuan,
> > but without success (as it seems the process used by their installation
> > disc wants to overwrite my home folder); I also gave exegnulinux, but
> > that also was unsatisfactory.
>
> If your home folder lives on the same partition as /, then you'll have some
> work to do :-)

Yeah ... I copied my home folder to another hard drive (a precaution for 
whenever I am about to experiment, or do something stupid); so that it would 
be possible to make my home folder something like sdb3, etc. ... if that is 
what you mean. 

Most of my important files are kept elsewhere, on other hard BIG drives; the 
root partion and home folder are installed on a 100 GB hard drive. And I only 
use the home folder for temporary files, which will eventually get moved to 
one of those other places. Otherwise, the only real purpose of my home folder 
is to keep all my settings intact. 

If I follow what you're saying, then I could partition that 100 GB hard drive 
something like: 
sda1 = /
sda2 = /boot
sda3 = swap

But that seems like a waste of space, as even a generous root partition has 
never been bigger than about 30 GB, and a boot partition is maybe 2 or 3, and 
maybe 4-6 GB for swap -- which leaves at least 60 GB for what? 

Or maybe something else would be better? Then I could use a partition on sdb 
as my home folder? 

Thanks for your advice, 

Bill


>
> > My current system is Debian Jessie, and runs pretty much like I want,
> > except for some minor bugs. My biggest complaint is systemd, and I really
> > want to go back to using sysvinit.
> >
> > Also: I wonder if it is possible to switch to Devuan without doing a
> > complete reinstallation? i.e., after changing over to sysvinit, can I
> > enable Devuan repositories (and disable Debian), then do something like
> > sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> > or whatever?
> >
> > Bill
>
> You can move from debian jessie to devuan jessie without problems, just
> follow the guide
> https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-jessie-announce-052517 section
> "Upgrade". When you do the upgrade, please do it on a console, not on a X11
> terminal.
>
> Nik