All that follows applies to my old auriga258 system. The focus of this document is on the configuration and tweaking of a new install of Bookworm (Debian 12.6) in an extra partition (sda3) on that system.
Primary partitions sda1, sda2, sda3, and logical partition sda4 containing sda5, already existed on the 1.5TB WD "Black" HDD in the machine. The existing partitions, originally created with my favourite partitioning tool gparted, and formatted to ext4, were:
sda1 Jessie (Deb 8), unchanged
sda3 Bookworm (Deb 12), newly installed and discussed herein
sda5 Large data storage area, unchanged
The entire Bookworm system with all my usual software installed (including
a bootable KNOPPIX iso image, build tools, computer languages,
libreoffice, octave, schroot, and lots more) took less than 20GB total
disk space!
During installation, I discovered that the upper port on the network card is identified as "ens4f0" (eth0) and that the network was running at 1000 Mbps! This was despite the fact that we only have Cat5 cabling (but the run is fairly short, which may explain the high performance).
Auto-configuration of the video hardware failed, as usual. To fix this, I used:
Xorg -configure
to generate a template in /root/xorg.conf.new that I could edit and
then copy to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/xorg.conf. However, I just copied
the xorg.conf file from Jessie (on sda1), compared it
to the template, and then placed that xorg.conf file in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. Video was now good as well as
stable; I no longer had the video "out of range" issue reported by the
monitor. Resolution was fine. I Backed up the working xorg.conf
to
ja.unix/BookwormAuriga258xorg_conf on another system. Note: this file
is for an older DCL-LCD monitor working with an Nvidia Quadro-4000 video
adapter.
I discovered that, due to an incompatibility in swap formats, I needed seperate swaps for Jessie (Deb 8.11 on sda1) and Bookworm (Deb12.6 on sda3). There were two choices: 1) Simply disable swap for Jessie, or 2) Create a swap file (rather than a swap partition) making it easy to install a new swap for Jessie. To create and set up an ordinary file as swap (swapfile is file name), one can use:
a) sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
b) sudo chmod 600 /swapfile (R/W only by root)
c) sudo mkswap /swapfile (Mark as swap)
d) sudo swapon /swapfile (Start it up)
e) sudo swapon --show (Check swap)
One can change a) as needed for the
desired swapfile size. Finally, to make it permanent (so it works after
a reboot):
f) sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.1.bak (Make a backup!)
g) echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
or better (given the need to delete the existing swap) simply open fstab in
any text editor and insert the relevant part of the line in step g into to
file.
Note 1: dd creates contiguous files (good for creating swap files).I decided to simply remove swap from Jessie by editing /etc/fstab (in Jessie, sda1) and commenting out the line that mounts swap. I can make a file (see above) and add it to fstab to re-enable swap but, given the large amount of RAM, swap is not really necessary. I tested the change by booting into Jessie on /dev/sda1 from the GRUB2 boot menu. Everything worked perfectly.
Note 2: There is 96GB of RAM in auriga258, an older Z-800 machine.
groups
This displayed the groups to which jeff currently belonged. To add jeff
to additional groups, I ran (as root):
useradd -G sudo,dialout,netdev,plugdev,cdrom,dip,video,audio jeffThis added jeff to the listed groups. The groups listed are the ones I needed for audio, video, network access, serial and usb port connections (e.g., for microcontrollers, SDRs, etc.), burning DVDs and CDs, and for easy root access using sudo.
a) joe .Xresources b) added the line: XTerm.vt100.scaleHeight:1.15One can test this first, in a more temporary manner, using:
c) xterm -xrm "XTerm.vt100.scaleHeight:1.15"
***** More To Be Added Here *****