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Stuff that makes things harder for me #559

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egrain opened this issue Mar 17, 2021 · 2 comments
Open

Stuff that makes things harder for me #559

egrain opened this issue Mar 17, 2021 · 2 comments

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@egrain
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egrain commented Mar 17, 2021

I was ask to voice my grievances, so here - we - go:

"UEFI booting with GRUB also requires a special partition of the type EFI System with a vfat filesystem mounted at /boot/efi. A reasonable size for this partition could be between 200MB and 1GB."

200MB to 1Gb? for /boot/efi? I would understand if it was /boot with the kernel it if it had 200MB, but even there 1GB? The kernel has 60mb, even says so in the documentation, right now. Do you think you need to store three of them at once? But it specifically said /boot/efi. Well, I listened to that, and now I have 156KB on a 799M partition.

In the Chroot part. It says you should choose your REPO, and later it says you have to set the Architecture. Well, I did it wrong apparently, because I set the variables as a user, but installed with sudo, and that's why I installed glibc instead of musl. That wouldn't have happened if it was mentioned that for musl you have to set the variables AND the repo url. Obvious to most of you, but I didn't know that. I thought, "de" in the repo name. Seems legit. Let's go! Changed the variables to x86_64-musl and installed via sudo xbps-install, but the variables I set as a user. You could tell people to look if musl or glibc is on the list of things to be installed.

Also why ARCH=x86_64-musl and then XBPS_ARCH=$ARCH? Why not XBPS_ARCH=x86_64-musl? And why $REPO? This could all be in one line. People copy it in there anyway.

This was a remote box for me, and if I hadn't done it before with Arch, I wouldn't have known that I also need to make sure that sshd and network was good to go. Obvious to you again, and this time to me as well, but not to others. Though what I didn't know, was that I had to ln -s things differently than when the system was actually running already. It's there in the runit section, but if it had been linked at least in the chroot section that would have been nice. I mean who uses chroot besides remote install people and when is the system also not running besides in a chroot?

rc.conf documentation is still a work in progress, right?

The rosetta stone page was really nice back in the day. Bring that back.

@ericonr
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ericonr commented Mar 18, 2021

200MB to 1Gb? for /boot/efi? I would understand if it was /boot with the kernel it if it had 200MB, but even there 1GB? The kernel has 60mb, even says so in the documentation, right now. Do you think you need to store three of them at once? But it specifically said /boot/efi. Well, I listened to that, and now I have 156KB on a 799M partition.

Some Apple devices require a 200MB minimum, others (iirc the EFI spec) require a 100MB minimum. Some people put the kernel in the ESP (I do), and since Void doesn't automatically clean up old initramfs/kernels (so you have to use vkpurge), it's easy for things to get bloated accidentally. If you know you don't need that much space, you can just not follow that part of the guide. We can try to add a comment on what would make more space necessary, but I'm not sure.

I guess we could mention REPO choice is influenced by C library, but it's the first information you see if you click the link about choosing the repo... The idea of not exporting XBPS_ARCH is that it avoids issues if you try to install a package from inside the live system.

It's there in the runit section, but if it had been linked at least in the chroot section that would have been nice.

Yeah that's doable.

rc.conf documentation is still a work in progress, right?

What do you mean?

The rosetta stone page was really nice back in the day. Bring that back.

I have neither the time or interest in learning about other package managers. I'd much rather improve XBPS docs with examples than porting the rosetta stone to the Handbook.

@egrain
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egrain commented Mar 18, 2021

I appreciate the quick answer.
In /etc/rc.conf there is stuff I have no idea about. I know what tty is, but why would I only start one or several? Do I need any for a remote server? If I get it wrong, does the box still boot? What's with the last thing. The cgroups and hybrids? No idea.

The rosetta stone page made switching to void very easier. Also even my female companion individual used it to look up ubuntu/mint commands and she really isn't a tech person. Don't worry though, I have it saved.

Also I forgot that in the wiki it was mentioned that some boxes need the EFI thing named BOOTX64.EFI, I think. I'm not exactly sure. If you are on one of those machines though and you have it named differently, it won't boot. Fringe case maybe, yet it was in the old wiki.

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