Dan Norton composed on 2017-11-13 10:26 (UTC-0500): > David Christensen wrote:
>> Dan Norton wrote: >>> My first Linux install was about one year ago. After some missteps, I >>> have used Debian 8 in reasonable satisfaction on the desktop during >>> that year. Now I want to leave 8 in place and do a network install >>> for Debian 9 on the same disk and switch back and forth at boot time. >> I think your best bet is to migrate from Debian 8 to Debian 9: >> 1. Image, backup, and/or archive everything. You will especially >> want to get a copy of the /etc tree onto a USB flash drive so you can >> see LVM, fstab, etc., configuration settings for mounting the Debian 8 >> disk under Debian 9. > Please say more about the configuration settings. All my machines are multiboot. Few have as few as 4 operating system installations, most have more than 12, and most of those not running RAID use only one disk. There's no need for separate home file systems to keep one installation from causing corruption to another's user settings. Simply do not reuse UIDs[1]. On your first, your Jessie probably has a user dan with UID 1000. On the next, don't use 1000 for user dan. Pick any other number, e.g. 1200 for user dan in Stretch. During Stretch installation make the initial user dan8 or dan01 using Jessie's UID (probably 1000) for dan. In Jessie, create a new user dan2 or dan09 using the UID you picked for Stretch. Booted to either, the homedir of the other can optionally be bind mounted as a subdir of the current dan for more convenient data access without interference with settings of the other. Either way you boot, you'll be user "dan", but without risk of settings corruption. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier -- "Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Whatever else you get, get wisdom." Proverbs 4:7 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/
