[ale] VOID linux, was: Re: Origins of Linux, do we care?

[James Sumners]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Paul Cartwright <pbcartwright at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Steve,
> that laptop already has linux Mint17 and Windows XP installed on it.
> cfdisk is new to me.. I've used parted, gparted, fdisk..... but not
> cfdisk.


cfdisk is just a prettier fdisk. parted and gparted solve a different
problem than cfdisk -- non-destructive partition editing.


> partitioning is not new to me, which is why I was amazed that it
> failed for me ;( for "normal" people with an existing system, you would
> think this would just WORK..
>

Why? No one ever said Void is an Ubuntu like distribution. It's more akin
to Slackware or Arch Linux. These are not distributions for the feint of
heart.


> I just ran cfdisk on my desktop system, cfdisk /dev/sdb, and that looks
> very much like what I saw on the void installer. not very intuitive, I
> had NO idea what I needed to do! after a few back & forths, it seemed
> that I had what I wanted, my existing /dev/sda2 as "/" and /dev/sda5 as
> /home, but it failed... I am at a loss as to what to do. I've never had
> success with chroot.. again the syntacs escapes me..


You should _*not*_ be using cfdisk on a disk that has data you want to
keep. It is a destructive partition editor. Unless you typically leave a
lot of unpartitioned space on your disks, you'll have to delete at least
some or all of your current partition map to create new partitions. It will
ask if you _really_ want to do that, and you have probably (correctly) said
"no." And that's the "failure" -- not destroying your data.


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.sumners.info/ (technical profile)
http://jrfom.com/ (personal site)
http://haplo.bandcamp.com/ (band page)
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