https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-user%40lists.debian.org/msg779582.html
Gene Heskett Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:14:03 -0800
<snip>
> On 2/19/22 06:31, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
<snip>
On 6/4/24 03:26, gene heskett wrote:
How much longer till trixie is officially out?? What you are proposing
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally
have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90%
of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors. The
first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I
don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer
ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve
left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing
on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or
brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss
about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.
I suggest:
1. Back up the system configuration and data.
2. Disconnect everything internal to the chassis except for the
motherboard, power supply, front panel, fans, processor, memory, and one
disk drive for the OS connected to the first IDE, SATA, or NVMe port.
3. Disconnect everything external to the chassis except AC power, wired
keyboard, wired mouse, wired monitor, and Ethernet.
4. Boot into Setup and reset settings to factory defaults. Choose
between BIOS/Legacy and UEFI, if there is a choice. Set the disk
controller mode to AHCI. Set the clock to UTC.
5. Boot the disk manufacturer toolkit and wipe the OS drive -- secure
erase for SSD's and zero-fill for HDD's.
I seem to recall that you have a 1 TB WD Black. WD does not appear to
offer a bootable disk drive toolkit (?):
https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/downloads/softwaredownloads
If you can find a FOSS toolkit to do a secure erase, that would be best.
Alternatively, find the non-zero blocks and zero them (a good job for
a script).
6. Boot debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso and install Debian onto the OS
disk. I partition manually with 1 GB EFI system partition, 1 GB boot
partition, 1 GB random encrypted swap partition, and a small passphrase
encrypted root partition (twice your current root partition usage?).
Save the remaining free space for CAD, CNC, 3-D, etc., working/ scratch
files and over-provisioning, to be configured after installation. If
your desktop environment of choice is not offered by d-i, do not install
a desktop environment.
7. At the end of installation, reboot. Remove d-i media during POST.
Verify the system boots from the OS disk. Login and check vitals, but
do not change anything. Power off.
8. Boot your FOSS toolkit of choice, or d-i rescue shell, and take a
compressed image of the OS disk to a file on a USB HDD.
I use a version control system (CVS over SSH) for software development,
but also find it to be very useful for system administration.
David
