Fedora 44 KDE installation

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1

I would like to try Fedora 44 KDE. I have one problem. The installer detected my Swap partition and says it will format it. That is an issue. This is a multi boot PC with multiple versions of Linux on it. The UUID of the partition will change if it formats the Swap partition. I will have to change fstab for every version of Linux I have on here to get them to boot normally. Is there any way around the installer formatting my Swap partition?

3

Welcome to the Fedora community :slight_smile:

Can you please post the output of lsblk -f so we have a clearer picture of the situation.

Thanks

4

Hi RubiRod. See below. Unfortunately the formatting doesnā€™t hold so it makes it hard to read. Thanks

NAME      FSTYPE  FSVER     LABEL    UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                                      
ā”œā”€sda1    vfat    FAT32              1977-2216                             954.2M     7% /boot/efi
ā”œā”€sda2    swap    1                  ccb7dd27-7c19-4806-8e39-7f1feb9984e1                [SWAP]
ā”œā”€sda3    ext4    1.0       FedoraX  abe73ec1-ffb3-40ca-a14e-5311b6a3b6ce     29G    46% /
ā”œā”€sda4    ext4    1.0       Quark    c4d8a8ba-d73c-459f-962f-e63a781752a1                
ā”œā”€sda5    ext4    1.0                3bddb97c-3e29-4a47-befb-61cec15365e6                
ā”œā”€sda6    ext4    1.0                095f490d-9c0b-4485-a43b-8054c14e4ec2                
ā”œā”€sda7    ext4    1.0                3279e2dc-63f7-4bfe-9e17-ccfd2bedb200                
ā”œā”€sda8    ext4    1.0                c58c1c3a-5687-461b-b057-5b0557f63be5                
ā”œā”€sda9    ext4    1.0                b96ef25c-4f21-433d-8a11-36243cb728e2                
ā”œā”€sda10   ext4    1.0       Debian12 97313b54-699c-4d15-b978-522be703fd04                
ā”œā”€sda11   ext4    1.0                3d209b00-9e3a-4017-9112-460860431e02                
ā”œā”€sda12   ext4    1.0                8ad2482f-39c9-40e5-9cba-ce46cecd3544                
ā””ā”€sda13   exfat   1.0       Files    9C98-E5AE
5

I tried replicating this in a VM (well, not with quite so many partitions :slight_smile: ) and even if I deactivated swap before running the installer, the result seems to be the same that the Fedora installer wants to format the swap partition.

Not sure what to suggest now. Hopefully, someone can come along with other ideas.

In the meantime, are you able to test in a virtual machine just to get a feel for the distro?

Sorry, I could not help more with this.

6

That should be fairly easy. Hide the swap partition before launching the installer by changing the partition type ā€“ for example, to ā€˜MS basic dataā€™ ā€“ and restore the setting after the initial installation.

7

I wonder whether it actually does go ahead and format the swap partition, or whether itā€™s a misleading message.

For example, if you install Fedora onto a disk with an existing EFI partition, but you want to add a new dedicated EFI partition for Fedora, I believe the installer UI tells you that the existing partition will be ā€œformatted as EFIā€, but actually it leaves it untouched.

8

I edited to add the pre-formatted text markup for you.
You can add it with the </> button.

9

Thanks

10

Iā€™ve had other distros using Calamares do this before but it has been a while. I know this isnā€™t Calamares. Itā€™s just where Iā€™ve run into it before. Thankfully that stopped happening. I know some people probably consider my setup a little crazy. I like to distro hop.

11

I may just give it a whirl and report back if I do. I will just hate to have to correct fstab on all the distros if I have to. The installer shouldnā€™t format Swap unless I tell it to.

12

The installer is assuming that you want it to do the obvious steps and not bother you with the details. As you know what you are doing you need to turn off stuff you do not want done.

13

If that happens then Just refomat once more and pass the previous UUID to mkswap.

14

There have been problems with selinux when a swap partition is used with multiple distros. See: https://github.com/fedora-selinux/selinux-policy/issues/508#top.

15

A swap partition is not the same as a swap file located in a btrfs subvolume.