Bug 1225689

Created attachment 875230 [details]
tik.log

What kind of storage device are we talking about here? And what kind of system specs (CPU? RAM?)

I'm curious because the error appears to be your system complaining that /var/lib/tik/mig/mnt wasn't present..but it was made immediately before hand

So I'm expecting a performance issue causing things to get confused

System specs "shouldn't" be an issue. (Famous last words).

It's a desktop I built myself, no issues installing or running RC1. 
CPU: Ryzen 5 5600x
RAM: 16 GB DDR4, 3200 Mhz
Install target: 256 GB Samsung NVME via PCIE
Drive for /home: 1 TB SSD - SATA

Only other "issue" I noticed was it took so long to get to the install screen that originally I rebooted to try again. Screen was just black. Second time I just waited it out. 

Sometime this evening or weekend I can try a different USB stick in case it caused issues. I used the recommended impression flatpak on RC1 to burn the image.

Almost forgot.

It does run a dedicated GPU: AMD 6600.

Ok, a little update here. There was no difference when using a different usb stick. 

I believe the issues is from how I installed the RC1. While I've run linux/BSD/plan9/etc for close to 20 years, I tend to avoid the shiny and new. So, I don't have a lot of experience with systemd or btrfs. 

With the old installer (yast I presume), I was able to edit the partitions and mount points after the system put in the defaults. I chose my secondary drive as /home and upon doing so, it removed the @/home subvolume from the primary nvme. Installation worked well and I've run it that way for months.

So, I'm wondering if the new installer notices subvolumes that would indicate a previous, Legacy Aeon install but runs into issues when it moves forward until @/home isn't found on that disk as it's on the secondary drive, which wasn't chosen for install.

As other, anecdotal evidence I installed universal-blue bazzite. The anaconda installer isn't as nice as yast and the only option I saw for using two disks was to select both for moving forward in the install. I'm not sure how this works with btrfs, but it shows 1.2 Tb or so of capacity (1 Tb ssd, 256 Gb nvme) for the subvolumes as if it is across both drives. 

With the idea that I could try this approach with Aeon, I reinstalled Aeon using the new image (RC2) but as far as I'm aware it only lets me choose a single disk. At least this time it installed successfully with no errors and offering to backup my home. It seems that after the defaults of bazzite were written over my custom install, Aeon install worked as an @home subvolume would be on that nvme drive. However, once again I'm stuck only using one drive. I tried editing /etc/fstab to use the secondary drive as @home (replacing the UUID of the primary drive with the second for the @home subvolume line) but it seems that isn't as straightforward with btrfs and subvolumes. It wouldn't boot. 

So....right now I'm on bazzite hoping that there is a way to use two drives on Aeon, even if it using the subvolumes, growfs, etc across both drives instead of isolating /home to one. Any chance or not supported?

Thanks

Ok so, a few questions and I’ll do my best to address them all

On the matter of your primary drive. No matter what you may have done in YaST, you have a /@/home subvolume.

But given you mounted a separate /home partition on your second drive, it should be empty

Now, I tested empty disks with /@/home subvolumes extensively and never hit this issue. So let’s just assume you have some weird other issue with your existing filesystem on your drive

We could debug it.. but it sounds like there’s no data of interest on that primary drive

So, I’d like to propose a workaround

Your Aeon installer comes fully equipped with a terminal (with sudo privileges) and all the partioning tools you may need

Before clicking ok on the installer welcome screen Id recommend firing up a terminal
And establishing a new partition table on the disk you want to install Aeon to

This error will vanish as a result

Meanwhile Aeons installer won’t touch the second disk (with your /home) at all

You have two options as how to make use of it after installing Aeon

Option 1. Boot your new Aeon install, go through the first run wizard and then after first login edit /etc/fstab to mount your /home partition instead of the /@/home subvolume. As long as UIDs and the like all match up things should work ok. You may need to run /usr/bin/aeon-mig-firstboot just to fix up a few things on first login to the migrated /home partition but I expect that to be a minor hiccup if at


Option 2. Aeon fully supports combustion. You could write a shell script to edit your new Aeon installs fstab, create user accounts, or any other customisation you like. That script needs to be called “script” and stored in a “combustion” directory on the “ignition” partition of your Aeon installer USB stick. Then it will be executed on first boot of your Aeon install. Potentially it’s a cleaner more reproducible approach that someone with your experience might appreciate 

Does this help at all?

Thanks, Richard. 

Seems like I was close before when editing fstab, I just should have removed the subvolume bit. 

So, I used cfdisk and mkfs.btrfs to clean up the two drives partitions and went through with the install. After logging into the new system, I edited the existing line in /etc/fstab that mounts /home by replacing the primary drive's UID with secondary drive's UID and removed the subvolume bit. 

However, after this the system didn't behave as expected. 

After editing fstab, I rebooted and while I was able to login and show the appropriate drives were mounted correctly, none of the changes from the Aeon firstboot had saved. I ran aeon-mig-firstboot (and later aeon-firstboot) but neither would complete. It stated that it could not mkdir /home/tony and could not install flathub repo. 

Making /home/tony was easy enough but the strange behavior continued. Every time I opened gnome-terminal it asked if I wanted it to be default. If I tried to pin the terminal icon to the dash, it gave a notification that it had been done but would immediately go back to the app drawer. After creating the /home/tony directory, I ran the firstboots again and each gave the same error about flathub repo not being able to install.

> It stated that it could not mkdir /home/tony and could not install flathub repo. 

I would assume your /home partition already has a tony user, for your tony user account..after all, that's who you should have already been logged in as..no?

aeon-firstboot and aeon-mig-firstboot aren't magic. They're required to be run by fully created users (normally created by gnome-initial-setup but ignition or combustion would be fine also)

a working valid /home/$USER directory would be mandatory

So..if you're trying to stitch things together using your own custom /home arrangement, you need to take care of those basics.

That's not going to be something we can ever fully support in Aeon - we have the recommended disk layout we have precisely to avoid stuff like this and the madness it causes :)

Hi Richard,

Seems we are miscommunicating. 

Good luck with the distro. 

If I can close this bug, I will. If not, please feel free to.