Ask Ubuntu, anyone?

[chimak111]

@GreyGeek, that's not my question. I saw it at Ask Ubuntu and posted a link to it here in case someone could pop over and help that questioner. Sorry for not being clear!

[SpecialEd]

Unless I missed it, the install process (Neon) does not "offer" the choice of using BTRFS. If you want to use BTRFS, you have to manually partition the disk, correct?

[oshunluvr]

Unless I missed it, the install process (Neon) does not "offer" the choice of using BTRFS. If you want to use BTRFS, you have to manually partition the disk, correct?

The default filesystem is still EXT4 if that's what you mean.

If you intend to use btrfs you must manually partition. Also you must create a swap partition because Ubiquity will use a swap file if no swap partition is present. This is not acceptable for btrfs installs as dynamically allocated files such as swap files can become corrupted on a COW file system like btrfs.

[SpecialEd]

The default filesystem is still EXT4 if that's what you mean.

If you intend to use btrfs you must manually partition. Also you must create a swap partition because Ubiquity will use a swap file if no swap partition is present. This is not acceptable for btrfs installs as dynamically allocated files such as swap files can become corrupted on a COW file system like btrfs.

Thanks, appreciate the tips.

[GreyGeek]

Unless I missed it, the install process (Neon) does not "offer" the choice of using BTRFS. If you want to use BTRFS, you have to manually partition the disk, correct?

That's correct. If you select "Choose the entire disk" it will default to using EXT4 without asking you to select a file system or giving you the option to format or not. So, to install Btrfs, you have to use the "Manual" route and chose the partition option so that you can remove any existing partitions and install on the HD itself (sda) or recreate sda1 and install to it. When you select either sda or sda1 you will have the option to change EXT4 to Btrfs and the option to reformat the drive or partition. You must also designate the drive as "/". Then, Btrfs will automatically create two subvolumes, @ and @home, which are like partitions. Later, you can mount your drive while your system is running and add new subvolumes (ie, partitions).

I prefer removing all partitions and creating sda1 as the only partition, then setting the fs to Btrfs, and checking the "format" checkbox.

You will want to avoid representing your HD as /dev/sdX or sdXn and refer to then by using the uuid (/dev/disk/by-uuid/)

~$ sudo btrfs fi show /
Label: none  uuid: [B]b3131abd-c58d-4f32-9270-41815b72b203[/B]
        Total devices 1 FS bytes used 106.26GiB
        devid    1 size 698.64GiB used 108.02GiB path /dev/sdc1

And, to mount it manually or in scripts:

[B]sudo mount[/B] /dev/disk/by-uuid/b3131abd-c58d-4f32-9270-41815b72b203 [B]/mnt[/B]

Once my system (while running) is mounted on /mnt I can use btrfs command to create a new subvolume, say, @data. Then, on the "root_fs" which /mnt represent I will see
@
@home
@data.
In /etc/fstab I can add a line to bind @data to /data and reboot.
If /data is owned by me I can use it as storage outside of home. If I install more than one distro, the way oshunluver does, all those distros can use @data as a storage subvolume. And, I don't have to worry about running out of room because I didn't size my subvolume large enough. Any subvolume automatically takes what ever additional space it needs from the pool. And, I haven't even touched on the flexibility of pools.

IF you have only one HDD on your system, as most laptops do, then it doesn't matter if you use /dev/sda1 or the uu-id when mounting or writing scripts, so /dev/sda1 is faster and easier to remember. HOWEVER, if you have two or more HDD's on your system certain conditions can cause the sdX1 designation to flip. I have three HD's, and when I added a second drive to my system to make a RAID1 they were labeled sda1 and sdb1. When I added the third drive and rebooted I was amazed to see that my RAID1 pair became sda1 and sdc1, and my third drive had become sdb1. I was always getting warning that sdc1 and sdb1 had the same drive designation, but it didn't cause any problems. When I later reverted my RAID1 to a two HD pool to increase the usable space the two drives remained sda1 and sdc1. When I removed the sdc1 partition from the two drive pool my sda1 remained sda1 and sdc1 remained sdc1. When I installed Kubuntu Bionic on my hardware to play with it and Brtfs I reformatted sdb1 and sdc1 and recreated them as separate pools for storage of snapshots and other files.

Now you know why I will only use Btrfs.

[SpecialEd]

That's correct. If you select "Choose the entire disk" it will default to using EXT4 >>>>>>
Now you know why I will only use Btrfs.

Thanks for that, I'll bookmark it. I figured as much when I installed it again but I knew I'd be reinstalling when 18.04 was available and/or when I replaced the HDD with an SSD. Just getting the feel of the machine for now.

[chimak111]

Can someone help out here?

Hide loop partitions / snaps in Krusader?

The poster has installed Krusader on Ubuntu 18.04 and is having some problems with snaps/loops/ "cluttering up that media list".