Linux Mint Forums

I am not a linux expert by any means, but i know my way around fairly well and can follow instructions.

I cannot for the life of me get LMDE installed on my machine. The live cd runs flawlessly, and I don't need any proprietary drivers, so I thought I'd be home free. However my desktop has the 'exotic' setup of having 2 sata drives and 1 ide drive. For whatever reason, just about every time my machine starts up what drive is aligned to /dev/sda, b, c changes, regardless of how I set my bios. I thought we were well beyond using the /dev names and instead used the uuid's for addressing drives/partitions, but apparently that is not the case...

At first I was having issues with my bios looking at the correct drive to start grub, so i would just get a wonderful 'grub error>' prompt. I have that all worked out, so now I get the grub menu. Most times it finds the kernel, but not always.

This may be part of the issue, but I am using btrfs for my / and /home partitions. I have a separate /boot that is ext4. The /boot and / are on one of my sata drives and the /home is on the ide drive. The other sata drive is unpartitioned at this point and probably will be for a little bit.

I have tried booting off the live cd, mounting my / partition and manually changing the fstab to use uuid's, but that still won't quite work. I get messages that some things are read only and if i'm lucky enough i will be dropped to a command line login, no gdm/gnome or x.

I would love to give the new monthly rolling setup a try. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

I cannot for the life of me get LMDE installed on my machine
I would love to give the new monthly rolling setup a try

If you want my advice then stop trying - for now. The new LMDE has not been released yet (although it looks fairly imminent). Even if you got the old one to install, you would be saddled with hundreds of updates, one of which is bound to baulk it. So you are really just wasting your time. Try again when the new iso is released. Keep a watch here:
http://community.linuxmint.com/iso

Where you will see that (at the time I read it) LMDE 64bit is 79.25% tested. I presume that when that figure reaches 100% it will be released.

If your machine doesn't work with the new version then I would seriously ask myself if you need btrfs. Then again I still use ext3 and ext2 so maybe I am the wrong person to judge that. Then again my LMDE works flawlessly. Whether that is coincidence or not I couldn't really say. It is my opinion that newer is not always better (rarely in fact).

Thanks for your input. I may be enough of a glutton for punishment to let it rest... lol.

Is there a particular reason btrfs could be causing this issue? I have no issues running ext3/4 on my drives if it is needed, I would just like to know why.

I checked out the link on the percent complete of the iso's. Is that an iso i can try out myself? Are the failures noted there based upon the installed system using the iso, or the live environment of the iso itself? I don't really care if the live environment is a smidge buggy, as long as the installed system isn't.

Is there a particular reason btrfs could be causing this issue?

No, I didn't say it IS a reason, I just said it might be. Having never used it I cannot tell you for sure one way or the other. My prejudices are more on display here than my knowledge. That is as honest as I can be. To me btrfs is new and therefore a possible source of trouble not a guaranteed one.

Is that an iso i can try out myself?

Sadly not, Mint testing doesn't work that way, which is a shame in my opinion. There might be a release candidate that you can test but that will probably come very close to the final release anyway.

Are the failures noted there based upon the installed system using the iso, or the live environment of the iso itself? I don't really care if the live environment is a smidge buggy, as long as the installed system isn't.

I don't know, because all testing in Linux Mint prior to release candidates is completely "closed source".

One of the testers might be able to answer that, but I am not one, so I can't.

Thanks again Viking for your input.

That really is a shame that their aren't iso's that can be tested, quite shocking really...

I guess I will have to wait for an RC to install LMDE, unless anyone else has some ideas and is willing to share.

you could try this

when I installed my LMDE I manually converted my /etc/fstab to use UUIDs, in terminal run "sudo blkid" and you get output like
make a copy of fstab

edit fstab and using your output from blkid (not mine) change it from to (noatime is optional, I read it can speed up the filesystem by not recording file access times)

daveerickson wrote: That really is a shame that their aren't iso's that can be tested, quite shocking really...

I agree with you, but Mint is so good in so many other respects that I tend to forgive this 'trangression'.

The justification for this situation is apparently that they have a relatively small team of developers compared to the size of the user base, and they feel that if they opened up testing to a wider audience they would be swamped by the response and not be able to act on the feedback anyway. So instead they restrict alpha/beta testing to a small group of hand picked individuals who presumably have some professional credentials or a deeper knowledge than the average user.

I think testing and bug reporting can be separate issues here. See the CyanogenMod team and how they handle it. They offer nightly builds for anyone to use and have an open bug tracker, they just don't accept bugs on non RC or stable builds. That way a person knows they are simply previewing what is to come, which may or may not work. Either way, I respect their choice here. I just think there are better ways to handle it.

Good news, I have LMDE up and running!

Instead of rebooting using the fstab pointing to the /dev mount points I changed them to UUID's before rebooting after install. I wouldn't think booting up pointing to invalid partitions would cause issues to the system, but maybe. I also rolled back to ext4 for all partitions. I am guessing that had more to do with my success.

I am going to try out different combinations of ext4 and btrfs partitions and see if I can pinpoint why it was failing. Thank you very much for the feedback/suggestions.

Dave