Re: couple newbie questions (install & doc)

From: Kevin Nathan (knathan_at_project54.com)
Date: 04/03/04 

Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2004 00:19:18 -0700

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 06:20:58 GMT
Cloud Burst <sun@shine.com> wrote:

> I figured out the solution while I was away, and did exactly
> as you proposed by loading the module. Interesting that
> there would be no mention of that in the README.
>

The assumption is that someone doing an FTP install is probably already
a Linux power user, or at least quite familiar with it. The newbies that
try it have a lot of problems, while the 'old pros' don't. YMMV.

> I'm using Partition Magic 8.0 (pm8) and have 2 hard disks.
>
> disk1: hda: ~74.5GB
> disk2: hdb: ~12.6GB
>

I almost always used PM (until recently) to pre-partition my disks. It
is now no longer necessary, and since I don't use Windows anymore, it's
a waste of money (for me). Plus, PM isn't keeping up with Linux file
systems as it is with Windows fs; but that has an obvious reason! :-)

> Plus about 500MB Linux swap (Ext2 format?)

How much physical RAM do you have? Plan on swap size to be twice the
size of your RAM -- some will argue the point that that's from the
'old days', but actually, the swap routines are written to *need* at
least twice RAM size. If you have enough RAM, you'll never use swap
anyway, but if you ever *do* need swap, less the twice RAM will cause
major performance hits.

> (as suggested by pm8, which said having the swap on a
> different drive than linux boot would perform better,
> makes sense to me.)
>

That's true, especially if you have *all* of Linux on one (or more)
drives and swap on a totally different drive. But, I've not noticed any
real performance problems with swap spread over three hard drives.

>
> OK. When I booted the SuSE install/ftp thing, it suggested
> I place the swap on disk2, followed by the rest of disk2 for
> the root partition.
>

Since you've already partitioned your drives, you can go into 'Expert
Mode' (I *think* that's what they call it) at the partitioning stage
and tell SUSE where to put what.

> I played with the partitioning options to put the swap back
> on disk1 (a faster disk than disk2).
>

Depending on the amount of RAM you have, you may not use swap very much
so *I* would put Linux on the fastest drive and swap on the slower.

> Do you have any
> suggestions as to how I should partition my disk2?

I would go with a *big* chunk for /home dir (that's where you will put
most of your files) and having /home separate will allow you to do a
fresh install with the next version and save all your data while doing
a format on the other partitions.

> Is one
> large partition smart/dumb/doesn't matter for a low-priority
> home install?

I would say it's not really critical for a home system. If you were to
run servers (apache, sendmail, ftp, etc.) it would be smart, but not
necessary otherwise.

> If I break up that 12.6GB pm8 partition into
> multiple smaller ones, do you know if pm8 will be confused?
>

No, PM doesn't get easily confused. Very solid programming team and
even their beta stuff was pretty stable (I used to beta-test for them
and really was impressed).

> 2. Suse wants to format in some sort of "reiter" format. I
> may be wrong with the spelling, but that's close.

'Reiser'. It's a journalling file system, which essentially means that
if you ever have to power-cycle the computer (or power goes out on you)
you won't have to wait for a *long* "scandisk" like in Windows. With
ext2, you will . . .

> However,
> pm8 did a "Ext2" format. Do you know if it matters to pm8
> if I take the suse option? Or does it really matter? Since
> it's linux, I suppose it DOES matter.
>

Yes, this matters a *lot*. PM does *not* understand any Linux file
systems other than swap and ext2. But, once it's partitioned, you
won't be using PM much.

On my system, I have disk 1 (/dev/hda) partitioned into a small /boot
partition (about 32 MB), a 13 GB / partition and a 6 GB /data partition
(which used to be a /home partition) and a 130MB swap. This drive has
SUSE 7.3 on it.

My second hard drive (/dev/hdc, with /dev/hdb being the CD-ROM) has a
1.4 GB swap and a 9.5 GB /home partition. This /home partition is shared
between both Linux systems (soon to be three).

My third hard drive (/dev/hdd) has a 130MB /boot partition (overkill,
but may share it with another distro or two that I plan to put on for
testing purposes), a 31 GB / partition (*really* overkill and will
reduce that sometime soon) and about 28 GB free, for the other distros
I want to play with. This drive currently has SUSE 8.2 on it.

With my /home partition separate, I can use either SUSE 7.3 or 8.2 and
have all my email/news and data files common to both (as long as the
appropriate programs are kept sufficiently close, version-wise) and
this came in very handy when my brand-new 40 GB hard drive died within
two weeks of putting 8.2 on it; I was able to switch back to 7.3 and
had my email/news current as well as all my documents and client data. 

-- 
Kevin Nathan (Montana, USA)
Open standards. Open source. Open minds.
The command line is the front line.
Linux 2.4.20-4GB-athlon
 11:44pm  up 6 days  9:28,  6 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.08, 0.08

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