Hit several problems when installing AntiX-9 to a friend's computer to upgrade an existing system
by hazel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4VY2H)
My own Antix upgrade was a whole disk install as I had no separate home partition on that machine and it contained no important data. I ran into some problems with the openchrome video driver (described in another thread) but they quickly got sorted by the community. Thanks, guys!
My friend's computer has pure Intel electronics so I didn't anticipate any problems. However, she has a more conventional layout with a home partition that contains a lot of data, so we chose the option to reuse existing partitioning. Everything appeared to go smoothly until we rebooted. Then all hell broke loose!
First of all we got the dreaded grub rescue prompt. Fortunately GRUB itself told us what was missing: a file in the /boot/grub/i386-pc directory. In fact, when we rebooted from the installation disc, I found that whole directory was missing. I copied it over from /usr/lib/grub and we rebooted. This time we got to a normal grub prompt. Back to the CD, chrooted and ran update-grub. After that we got a normal boot. It's clear that the whole grub install on that branch of the script was bad.
And that wasn't the only thing. During the install I had set a root password and created a user for my friend. Neither of these worked. Fortunately the demo user was still available (surely it shouldn't have been at this point) and I was able to log in and check /etc/passwd. There wasn't an entry for my friend and I think the root password must still have been the original one. It seems we had a simple copy of the passwd and shadow files from the CD rather than one that embodied our choices. I guessed that demo had full sudo rights, so I logged in under that name and did a sudo su, then reset the root password and created the other user.
Then we ran into another problem. My friend could log in at a console but not via slim. All she got was "failed to execute login command". However I could log in via slim as root. By this point we were both tired so we decided to call it a day. A little googling shows that this error is definitely a slim configuration problem. I shall need the names of a few files to check next time I go round there.
It seems that this type of installation using existing partitions misses out at least two stages that the whole-disk installation carries out successfully.
My friend's computer has pure Intel electronics so I didn't anticipate any problems. However, she has a more conventional layout with a home partition that contains a lot of data, so we chose the option to reuse existing partitioning. Everything appeared to go smoothly until we rebooted. Then all hell broke loose!
First of all we got the dreaded grub rescue prompt. Fortunately GRUB itself told us what was missing: a file in the /boot/grub/i386-pc directory. In fact, when we rebooted from the installation disc, I found that whole directory was missing. I copied it over from /usr/lib/grub and we rebooted. This time we got to a normal grub prompt. Back to the CD, chrooted and ran update-grub. After that we got a normal boot. It's clear that the whole grub install on that branch of the script was bad.
And that wasn't the only thing. During the install I had set a root password and created a user for my friend. Neither of these worked. Fortunately the demo user was still available (surely it shouldn't have been at this point) and I was able to log in and check /etc/passwd. There wasn't an entry for my friend and I think the root password must still have been the original one. It seems we had a simple copy of the passwd and shadow files from the CD rather than one that embodied our choices. I guessed that demo had full sudo rights, so I logged in under that name and did a sudo su, then reset the root password and created the other user.
Then we ran into another problem. My friend could log in at a console but not via slim. All she got was "failed to execute login command". However I could log in via slim as root. By this point we were both tired so we decided to call it a day. A little googling shows that this error is definitely a slim configuration problem. I shall need the names of a few files to check next time I go round there.
It seems that this type of installation using existing partitions misses out at least two stages that the whole-disk installation carries out successfully.