Emmabantus Debian 4 Edition Installation

I had some major issues on installation of Emmabantus.

Now I know why Emmanantus could not be installed.
This distribution is meant for Africa and Asia in rural communities.
It is meant to be installed from a DVD since it has large number of packages.
It is not meant to be installed from a USB.
After partitioning with USB it looks for the DVD in the CD ROM and if the ROM is empty it hangs up.

I tried with a DVD and I had no problems.

I think the developers should work on this and allowed it to be booted from a USB.

USBs have come down in price and DVDs are being discontinued and finding a DVD is difficult and they have gone up in price.

I list them later but basically I think it is due issues with EFI partition and GRUB boot loader.

1. Number one problem was that the image I wrote in a 4GB USB was faulty.
It has over 5 Million MB files that cannot be accommodated in a 4GB USB.
Solution is to use 8GB USB.

2. I did not check that the iso image is complete and intact.

Simple way to check, is to use K3B and try to write it on a DVD (one need not have to write it to a DVD) and the K3B checks the integrity.

After 5 or more attempts of failed installation in a second hard drive I went back to Linux basics.

Check the image stored in an external SATA Disk and found it faulty.
Solution I had a spare image and redid the installation to the USB which is 8GB.

It had Fedora in the USB and I do not use Fedora at all and erased it with Emmabantus image.

3. Number 3 is Debian and Emmabantus cannot properly configure EFI partition for booting.

The GRUB file has to be written there and the Reserved BIOS Area of the old does not work now.

4. Number 4 is Debian and Emmabantus cannot look for all the distributions installed in my two hard disks of 2 terra bytes.

One terra bytes is for data which is never full.

It copies an old GRUB (already changed by me) which fails to boot to any distribution.

I do not keep a record of the partition table to change which one to boot at boot time.

5. Will you give up?

You should not.

Solution is simple.

Ubuntu has a great GRUB file and looks for everything before writing the final boot record.

6. Here how you do it with Ubuntu?

a) Install Ubuntu on any of the drives and let it take over the disk.
b) I resize the /root partition using Gpart.
c) Do not touch the EFI partition Ubuntu has created, one needs it for booting.
d) Install other distribution of your liking in the space created by the resizing.
The next distribution also takes over the rest of the disk and most of it is allocated to home partition.
e) Delete the home partition and make a new home partition smaller leaving space for a third distribution if you wish.

f) You  would find the distribution crashes at GRUB install.

Do not worry.

g) Either reinstall Ubuntu or make another copy of Ubuntu and the job is done by Ubuntu in it's Updated GRUB file.

Bottom line is before the power cut in Ceylon, I got all the distributions, I need including Linux Mint.

I have given a rough sketch of partitioning in another blog piece.

Make sure you have several swap partitions.

I install a swap partition on the boundary of each distribution.

One need not follow exactly what I have said and done, the user should feel free to experiment and get the best out your distribution.

But one should invariably have a copy of Ubuntu for posterity.

I am fast becoming an adopter of Ubuntu.

I have not yet tried Ubuntu 22-4.

Excuse me for typos.