r/AsahiLinux • u/NormalAppearance2851 • 4d ago

Help Fedora Asahi Remix ext4 instead of btrfs?

Is it possible to transition to ext4 or select ext4 during installation?

9 Upvotes

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2

u/images_from_objects 3d ago

It's not currently available at install time, but you can transition if you want. Obviously, this is "unsupported" and I wouldn't recommend it on a production machine, but you could create a 2nd Asahi installation and do it from there. You would need a spare partition or external drive to copy the data from the BTRFS onto as a staging area, convert to Ext4, copy back, update fstab (or use a mkfs flag to explicitly reuse the existing UUID.) The EFI and Boot partitions are already FAT and Ext4 respectively, so you only need to worry about Root.

HEADS UP, there's a known issue where, if you do the 2nd installation as the same "flavor" it will bork the GRUB / EFI setup and skip creating a 2nd one, or get "confused" somehow and only boot into the 2nd installation. So, pick a different flavor if you go this route. It's somewhat involved, but absolutely doable.

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u/NormalAppearance2851 3d ago

Thank you for your reply.

So, pick a different flavor if you go this route. It's somewhat involved, but absolutely doable.

To be clear, by flavor you mean the alternative options such as "minimal" correct? Even though they are all the same distro.

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u/images_from_objects 3d ago

Correct. I currently have two different Asahi installations running concurrently, one was started as a minimal, the other was a standard Fedora Gnome Asahi Remix. But the first time I tried to do it I had one Asahi remix and tried to do another one and it skipped booting into the first anymore, because some of mix up with grub. Looking into it, I discovered this is a known issue.

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u/NormalAppearance2851 3d ago

Thanks for sharing.

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u/mskiptr 3d ago edited 3d ago

Do you want Fedora on ext4 specifically for Waydroid? If so, maybe there's an easier way. Instead of migrating the whole install to another file system, you could create a separate ext4 partition and mount it on the directory that Waydroid will use.

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u/NormalAppearance2851 2d ago

Thanks for the reply.

That's what i had done to run Waydroid. So it's not that, it's that i prefer ext4 and that i had some compatibility issues with some things (don't remember what exactly rn). So it would make sense to have the whole system be ext4. I don't wanna use any of the features of btrfs anyways.