LMDE install woes

[azadian]

I installed LMDE 16 on top of an old LM 13 partition, naturally using manual partitioning. I had 4 problems:

1) the USB3 driver wanted to use MSI-X, which I didn't have. Solved this by adding ACPI=OFF on the boot line in grub.cfg.

2) grub-mkconfig (run under arch linux on another partition, because it is the owner of the grub installation) somehow used the wrong UUID on the boot command line. Fixed this by copying the one from the search line to the boot command line. This is probably not a problem with LMDE.

3) X-server wouldn't start up; something about wrong ABI versions.

4) No users were installed. No root, no mint, not even the one I configured during the installation.

This is pretty depressing.

[xenopeek]

I installed LMDE 16

There's no such thing. You will mean either Linux Mint 16 or LMDE (which doesn't have a release number as it is a rolling release). Which is it?

[azadian]

Sorry, I meant the latest LMDE, 20140302 IIRC.

[Monsta]

3) X-server wouldn't start up; something about wrong ABI versions.

4) No users were installed. No root, no mint, not even the one I configured during the installation.

This looks like the installer didn't finish normally, and you don't have the fully installed/configured system.
Were there any error messages during the installation?

[azadian]

There was no obvious indication that something had failed. I went through the whole drill twice, and my impression each time was that it was successful.

[daspicer]

Impressions aside, if you didn't get the popup telling you that the installation was completed, and asking you if you would like to reboot, then the installer crashed.

[azadian]

I believe there was no popup. So if I do this again, what will I want to be looking for?

[Monsta]

If you'll happen to go through it another time, run the installer from the terminal:

Code: Select all

gksu live-installer

and post the output here (don't forget the "code" tag).

[killer de bug]

So if I do this again, what will I want to be looking for?

It's not if. You need to do it again. And format your / partition.

[zerozero]

If you'll happen to go through it another time, run the installer from the terminal:

Code: Select all

gksu live-installer

and post the output here (don't forget the "code" tag).

and remove the username and password from the output; the terminal output will display them in plain text.

[daspicer]

If the install completes successfully, you'll get a popup similar to this:
http://tinyurl.com/q93ngd2

[azadian]

I think I actually did get that popup before.

I did it again, this time with a few differences, and I now have a running system. Thanks, guys.

Now let me explain what I did different this time, and also a couple bugs I found along the way.

This time I re-formatted the target partition. Since there was already a good JFS on there, I hadn't felt the need previously.

I have a home partition which I share between two different Linux distributions. Previously I had that partition mounted, and was then dismayed to see that it did a chown -R ... on my home directory. Problem was, the first user has ID 1000 under LM, and 1001 under arch. This time I didn't have it mounted, so the installer couldn't screw it up for me.

This time I had no problem with the ACPI, or with the grub-mkconfig putting in the wrong disk UUID. Dunno why. Sometimes I have to be satisfied with success.

This time, I ran into the problem that fsck.jfs was not found. Then I was given the option of fixing things up in single-user mode. That wasn't possible, for two reasons. Firstly, I couldn't login to single-user mode because the root password did not work. I suspect the root user was not installed at this point. Secondly, the problem was the missing program, not the filesystem. I solved this problem by adding the program from arch linux. Obviously, though, there's a couple bugs here that need to be ironed out.

Once I got to the login screen, the problem with the different user/group ID came up. I logged in, but had the wrong ID for my home directory, and X logged me back out. So I opened up a virtual terminal, tweaked /etc/{group,passwd}, and I was able to stay logged in under X. Mission accomplished.