How to switch from Aurora to Bluefin LTS?

[davestgermain]

Since Aurora will be dropping ZFS, I thought I'd switch to Bluefin LTS, but I'm stuck at the partition selection in the installer.
My drive is a standard, encrypted btfs installation.

I chose the Bluefin LTS +hwe installation iso, which is supposed to support btrfs.

I picked "manual partition map" (or whatever it's called), and I'm given options to map / /boot and /boot/efi, but my existing installation has /boot, /boot/efi, and an encrypted btrfs partition for the rest (with subvolumes for /var/home and so on).

I only need to keep the /var/home subvolume, but I don't see an option in the installer to keep it. It's looking to map / to some device, which won't work.

I'm really hoping to avoid having to transfer my /var/home onto another drive, and then back, because that will be a big hassle. But there doesn't seem to be another way.

Any ideas?

[mheuvel-dev]

Your request is unsupported according to the docs, https://docs.projectbluefin.io/installation/

The docs give you suggestions on tools for backup and restore of your home directory.

There may be some who found a loophole. You may loose your data with alternative installments. Before experimenting, I would recommend to have a backup strategy in place if your home data is valuable to you.

[sebjag]

I only need to keep the /var/home subvolume, but I don't see an option in the installer to keep it. It's looking to map / to some device, which won't work.

Someone did a similar thing recently by adding a "/home" mount, see: #4609 (comment) (note "Reformat" is unchecked, and then it says "mount" instead of "format" for the /home subvolume)

For comparison: Bazzite docs showing default partitions.

Since what you want to do is unsupported/untested, proceed at your own risk. You may want to test this path in a VM first.

I'm really hoping to avoid having to transfer my /var/home onto another drive, and then back, because that will be a big hassle.

Always backup your data first.

[davestgermain]

The solution in the other thread doesn't work for me because I'm switching to Bluefin LTS, and the installer apparently doesn't know how to deal with btrfs subvolumes. At least, I couldn't figure it out. Bluefin LTS seems to require XFS filesystems, as far as I can tell.

I ended up backing up and restoring. Everything's running fine now.

As a bonus, this installation is running with a lot lower idle power usage, compared to Aurora (~6W vs ~10W).

[manfredlotz]

Last week on Friday I switch from Aurora to Bluefin, i.e.

• from an Aurora custom image based on aurora-dx-nvidia-open
• to a Bluefin custom image based on aurora-dx-nvidia-open

Before switching I pinned the last Aurora image. One never knows.

sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/manfredlotz/bluefin-dx-nvidia-open-ml:stable

Tested successfully things before in a virtual machine and then did it. I only had a problem with Gnome settings having a core dump but I played it the safe way and moved ~/.config and .local/share away and moved back what I knew I need. Then things were good. Could be that the ~/.config/gtk-3.0 or ~/.config/gtd-4.0 were the cause but did not investigate further.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that besides backups I also rsynced /etc/ to a safe place.

[sebjag]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Good tip about the config files. Regarding the bootc switch part, in this case since OP wants to move to Bluefin LTS (CentOS base), I think that requires a re-install. In any case, these are uncharted waters, so trying in a VM first is a good idea.

[manfredlotz]

I don't know if switching to Bluefin LTS is different. But testing things is absolutely recommended.