Coming up for air

[hazel]

The last few days have been exciting in a thoroughly unpleasant way. My attempt to install Bodhi Linux in place of Debian was a disaster due to the silly Ubiquity installer that Bodhi inherited from Ubuntu. It shrank my home/data partition from 10GB to 7GB and created an extended partition of 7GB out of that and the space that I had cleared for it. In this are an ext4 logical disk that I can't mount and therefore can't make bootable with LILO (though I can read it from the Bodhi live disc and it seems to have a working Linux system on it) and a second swap file. Needless to say I asked for none of this.

I plan to delete this new partition and create a primary ext3 partition in its place. Then I would like to copy Crux over; it's always been a bit cramped in 3.9GB. I think I can do it with

dd count=3088076 if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda4

3088076 is the number of occupied blocks on sda1 according to df. But I'd welcome confirmation that this is safe before I actually do it.

That will eventually give me space at the beginning of the drive to install something else. But I want it to be something traditional, not another of these fancy-schmancy "user-friendly" things that don't let you partition a disk properly. Any suggestions?

[Peter D]

Sorry that you've had so much trouble with Bodhi. I'm quite enjoying it - although it's only installed on an old (and virtually useless laptop). I won't be installing it on anything I need to work well any time soon.