I just reinstalled antiX 13.2 32-bit on my laptop (300 MHz Pentium II, 288 MiB RAM, 16 GB compact flash drive); the install went smoothly, no problems (once I got a good boot from USB); instead of completely blanking the install partition (which contains both / and /home), I told the installer to keep the existing /home, planning to reuse it (it's got a little saved information, mostly wallpaper images). Once the install was completed, I rebooted, pulled the CD (with a boot manager that lets me start this antique from a USB key) and the USB, and it started right up -- but once I got to the login screen, I couldn't type my login into the field and could only use the power button to exit. I know the keyboard is/was working, because I had to add cheat code"acpi=off" before Linux would boot, and the same thing happened on a second restart, when I again typed the cheat code. The usual startup message about keymap loading appeared in the first few lines of boot, so I presume the kernel loaded the keyboard driver successfully. I've checked pretty extensively (though not exhaustively) for stuck keys and"mouse" buttons (the laptop has a built-in touchpad with two buttons corresponding to mouse buttons).

Suggestions?

You asked about his before and the advice was NOT to keep existing home via the installer.

At that time, I was upgrading from antiX 13.1 to 13.2. This was, in a sense, a downgrade, from an up to date testing install to the several months old stable files in the .iso -- but this begs the question:

If preserving the old /home doesn't work, why does the option exist -- in every Linux installer I've used to date? Or is it only a problem if you make the new user account with the same name as the old, and reuse the old /home when prompted (if this last, then why does this option exist)?

I guess I need to start that machine on Parted Magic (if I can get a full boot from the CD) or on the freshly re-burned antiX Live USB, back up /home, and install clean. There goes a chunk of Saturday, but I'd have had to do it that way if I'd known the"easy" way wouldn't work, anyway.

Silent Observer wrote: If preserving the old /home doesn't work, why does the option exist -- in every Linux installer I've used to date? Or is it only a problem if you make the new user account with the same name as the old, and reuse the old /home when prompted (if this last, then why does this option exist)?

Good question, my thought is that perhaps there is just too much data to move around or that the configuration needed to be done is greater than the resolution to any of the problems that arise.

Maybe the option should be split into two items. One to preserve the data (anything without the beginning".") and the second to preserve the configuration files (anything with the beginning".")?

That being said the only time I have preserved the configuration files is when I know that they are clean and the version that was currently installed was close to the one in the iso. Then the preserve home option generally works out ok for me.

As you want to keep your old home partition, & the installer isn't working for you, re install the system into a reformatted / partition. Use a disk manager to delete it & then recreate a new partition; this has worked for me before, (not specifically AntiX distro), & allowed me to re use my old /home.

Second option, just install to your / partition (include /home), then re boot & change your (/)etc/fstab to point to your old /home partition.

Dave, I think it would make more sense (given I'd normally be installing the same distro only if upgrading or if it's broken) to give the option to preserve the old /home folder, but automatically rename it (without asking"do you want to use the old /home?") if the new user created during installation is the same name as an existing user home. It's trivial to copy information from the old folder or, for"power" users who are certain the old folder is"just fine", to change the names; not so much to recover a system that can't be logged into (or other bizarre behavior that doesn't include normal operation) after doing what seems a reasonable thing to avoid having to spend extra time on the reinstall.

Fatmac, I don't have an old home"partition" -- this is a limited space installation, and I put /home in / instead of on another partition (as was suggested to me by someone when I mentioned I was having trouble coming up with the right combination of gigabytes to leave enough room for root and still have a useful size home). Since the Live session crashed before completing the copy of the old home folder to the free space on the USB (requiring me to burn the USB again, my USB key becomese unbootable after the slightest insult), I'm going to try preserving home, but answering"no" when asked if I want to use the same home folder for the same user (I use the same username for my own use on all the Linux systems in the house, so I don't always find myself typing the wrong login half a dozen times, and finally logging in as root, because I've forgotten what username I have on a particular machine).

But you are not simply doing a reinstall. Your old /home included config files you added/adapted when using Debian Testing repo. If all you had done to your /home was not related to any config files, then it would probably work ok.

Is there anything I can do in terms of using a system without modifying or adding config files?

Anyway, following this up: I reinstalled from a freshly re-burned USB (I seem to get one try each time I put antiX on the USB; the next time I want to use it, it's not bootable), preserving data in /home, but when I created the user, selected to save the old home folder but create a new one -- which shouldn't even affect what I'm doing before logging in, when the user-specific configurations aren't even loaded yet. In any case, even with a fresh user home folder, I still get a boot to the login screen and can't type in the field. I don't know if it's related, but I'm getting an error message early in startup about udevadm not finding something (it hangs on long enough to read, but only just, and my memory isn't photographic enough to get it verbatim); I don't recall ever seeing a message like this before reinstalling, and it's after the last time I use the keyboard prior to login (to enter the"acpi=off" cheat code needed to boot). This failure occurs with or without the USB sound device, with or without the PCMCIA wifi unit.

Okay, I think there's a minor bug in either the antiX installer or something that underlies it: after finally getting everything out of the old user folder that I wanted to keep, I deleted and recreated the partitions antiX used (changing from combined root and home to separate partitions, and shrinking the excessively large swap while I was at it). Because I was thinking about reducing the swap when I started that, I created the swap first of the three, winding up with swap at sda7, root at sda8, and home at sda9 (sda1, sda5, and sda6 are the Win98 partitions); three times in a row, with that setup, the installer failed without any message (when I stepped out of the room) sometime between the 95% progress and the point it should have asked if/where I wanted to install GRUB.

On a hunch, I then deleted the partitions again, and recreated them in the order root, home, swap (so root is sda7, home sda8, and swap sda9) -- and the install sailed right through on the first try. I used the same formats in both cases, and the root partition was (slightly) larger the first two times than the final successful attempt (and gparted showed root only about half full after the first two failures), so root didn't just get too full to work. I got wifi up almost instantly after rebooting, and the machine is now most of the way through instaling the 1100 upgraded and new packages for the conversion from Wheezy to testing repos.

Once that finishes, I'll go back and edit the startup file entry that blocks USB from being the first sound system, and should have sound again (if not, I'll go back to my original thread from setting up the sound -- likely have to do that anyway to get midi music working again), and be back where I was before the problems started, except with a battery to cut down mightily on the unclean shutdowns.

Edit to add: I also have a hypothesis about why no-format installs weren't working (which makes it a generally bad idea to put /home in root); that is, I think, when installing without formatting the / partition, the installer may only replace missing or older files; as a result, the installer, with Stable repo versions, may replace only packages that had been removed from a Testing installation. To my mind, that makes a lot more sense as an explanation for the inability to type at login that I had than config files in the user directories affecting operation before login tells the system which user to read configs from; that is, an installer failing to replace files on a no-format install could lead to random-seeming failures in the generic pre-login operation of the system, where application configuration shouldn't. If confirmed, I'd consider this, too, a bug in the installer; which ought to completely clear and recreate the root tree (aside from /home, if to be preserved) even if the partition isn't to be formatted.

Silent Observer wrote:I think, when installing without formatting the / partition, the installer may only replace missing or older files; as a result, the installer, with Stable repo versions, may replace only packages that had been removed from a Testing installation.

I think you're right. I've been bitten by this before. I agree this is a much better explanation for what happened.

If confirmed, I'd consider this, too, a bug in the installer; which ought to completely clear and recreate the root tree (aside from /home, if to be preserved) even if the partition isn't to be formatted.

I agree. I would classify this as a bug. It would be much better to wipe the partition clean than to copy on top of an existing installation. IMO whatever convenience there might be from not deleting first is vastly outweighed by the strange problems that it can create. My goal is to reduce the number of strange problems that have to be dealt with in the forums.

One solution would be to use rsync (with the delete option) to make the copy. I think we could preserve /home with an exclude option. If someone is re-installing over a recent install then rsync should be faster than a delete and copy. If that doesn't work then we could just delete everything but /home before copying files into the root file system.

BitJam wrote:I agree. I would classify this as a bug. It would be much better to wipe the partition clean than to copy on top of an existing installation. IMO whatever convenience there might be from not deleting first is vastly outweighed by the strange problems that it can create. My goal is to reduce the number of strange problems that have to be dealt with in the forums.

One solution would be to use rsync (with the delete option) to make the copy. I think we could preserve /home with an exclude option. If someone is re-installing over a recent install then rsync should be faster than a delete and copy. If that doesn't work then we could just delete everything but /home before copying files into the root file system.

Another thing that would make it easier to make the decision to reinstall, rather than fighting with a failing system like I've been doing for the past week or more, would be to provide a"reinstall" option that automatically saves the list of installed packages and reinstalls them as part of the installation process -- this would be best combined with better progress information than just a crawling bar with a percentage, of course.

If you run 'apt-cache pkgnames', you will get a list of all installed packages. That will let you do a 'diff' against a fresh install. to see what you installed since the original installation. I know its probably too late for you just now, but might be something to think about for the future.

The antiX installer wipes away all the contents of the / partition. (unlike some other installers). What might be happening is that your hard drive is failing and even though the installer dletes it (or thinks it has) in effect in hasn't. I have had this happen on usb devices. I use gparted to wipe the stick and format from fat to ext3 for example, but when I plug in the stick, the old folders are still there. The fault is not with gparted, but the drive.

In the situation you mention there, about the stick not getting properly wiped out, I use dd to zero out the boot sector, then it will usually install properly.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<pendrive> bs=512 count=1

fatmac wrote:In the situation you mention there, about the stick not getting properly wiped out, I use dd to zero out the boot sector, then it will usually install properly.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<pendrive> bs=512 count=1

This is what the installer does to the root partition.

From the installer code