[dundee] a few questions re LVM, filesystems and VBox

[garryg]

Morning folks,

I have a few questions for y'all and hope someone/anyone can help
clear things up for me. I'll try to be as brief as poss.

1) I've installed Ubuntu 9.10 using the alternate install cd so i
could encrypt my hard drive and then partition using the LVM - that's
all fine. After install, i can create new logical volumes ok but when
mounted i only have ro permissions as group owner is root (still don't
quite get that one when the LVs were created using my root pwd -
another time for that one). Anyway, once the new LVs are mounted i can
(re)format each LV using Ubuntu's Palimpsest Disk Utility and take
ownership of the filesystem that way, getting me both read and write
permissions. It just seems a pretty round about way of getting there
and I'm pretty sure after a scan of lvm2 documentation that doing this
would probably be a lot simpler from the command line, but i ain't
there yet... So, basically, am i ok using this method to create new
LVs or am i storing up future trouble for myself here by mixing lvm
and disk utility to achieve my ends?

2) I wanna do a fresh install to get things ready for starting my OU
course next month and wanna make a bunch of LVs for VMs as trying
out/working with different distros is part of the course work i
believe. However, the newest version of vbox (3.2.8 - not the ose)
tells me it doesn't like being used on an ext4 fs. So, should i make
them ext2 or ext3 or does it not really matter? Oh, thanks for the nod
Gordon re using the most up-to-date version as i can get USB support
no prob now which makes a big difference - i may even finally be able
to get that damn dongle working through a hawk, spit, windows distro
in a VM (i've tried and tried but just can't get it to work with
Ubuntu unfortunately - i know it can be done but it's beyond me the
now).

3) mount points: when creating a new partition(s) - LV or otherwise -
should i be assigning mount points or is it ok to just mount when
required as if they're external media? That's what i've been doing so
far (they just get mounted at /media and all seems to work fine for me
this way. Again though, i wonder if i'm storing up trouble going about
things in this fashion?

Ok, i'll leave it at that for now. Any and all input will be very much
appreciated indeed. Thanks.

Cheers,

Garry.