[Sussex] Hello!

[Ciaran Hamilton]

Hi,

Wow, lotsa replies. Thanks - it's nice to see a fast-moving list where I
can feel welcomed. :D I'm currently on digest mode on the list actually,
since it *is* so fast moving and Evolution seems to have quirky mail
filters (I somehow end up having two copies of every message - one in
the correct folder and one in another folder. And yes, I did select
'move to', not 'copy to'). Anybody know a really good mailer they could
recommend that looks at least vaguely like OE and isn't KMail or
Evolution?

> > > Hi all,
> > 
> > Hi there.. 
> 
> Hi.  I hope this is also a sign that you'll be coming along to
> the MOOT this Thursday.  If you can get yourself there I can promise
> you a lift home.  If neither Geoff or Dom make it EG is not that far
> of my route home.

I hadn't actually thoug tabout that. I hope the meeting isn't regularly
on a Thursday because most of my evening is filled up - I go to a youth
cell group from my church from 7:30pm-9:30pm and I don't finish work
until 5:00pm, so it doesn't leave me a lot of time left. :(

> > > Any ideas on a good partitioning strategy, given that my
> > > computer has 256MB of RAM?
> > 
> > For simplicity I'd go with:
> > 
> > Somewhat less than 1GB for swap.
> > Around 100MB for /boot (you can get by with less, but you 
> > might want several
> > kernels)
> > Everything else as /

No /home partition? I thought the best advice was to have /home split
from the rest of the disk so that if you ever (surely not!) need to
reinstall, or something equally bad happens, you can easily restore your
personal stuff...

> Call me old hat but I still believe in partioning my disk into 
> more parts.  There are three reasons for this:
> 
>  1). fsck doesn't take as long,

fsck? What's fsck? I use ReiserFS, y'know. ;)

[snip]
> As for partioning I layout my disks something like this:
>   /dev/hda1  /
>   /dev/hda2  swap
>   /dev/hda5  /usr
>   /dev/hda6  /var
>   /dev/hda7  /home
>   /dev/hda8  /usr/src

Looks good, but except for the fact that I don't normally compile stuff
in /usr/src, I normally do it straight from my home directory. Is that a
bad idea?

> I don't bother with a /boot partion - all my BISOs support a large boot
> partion and I don't run any M$ software that might also have problems.

He has a point, though - if you have /boot as part of / and something
mucks up /, the files in /boot/ would go *poof* with it. If it's
unmounted, then it won't. Only problem I can see with that though is
that you'd have to remount /boot any time you ran lilo too reconfigure
the bootloader, which would be a pain.

> I don't have the sizes on my 30GByte disk as I'm at work but post back if
> you want the sizes.  It is a good idea these days to give /var a bit of 
> space as there are a number of caches that are configured to be there
> esp in Debian.

It'd be a good idea to see the sizes, yep. Actually, it'd also be a good
idea to see how much you're actually using on these partitions too, so
if you don't mind, the output from "df -h" would be useful, thanks. :)

BTW, the Windows partition isn't Windows XP - I wouldn't go near that
with a bargepole. It's Windows 98.

> If you have more than one disk - split the swap space in half and have a
> swap partion on each disk.  The Linux kernel is very good in it's use of
> swap space.  If one disk is busy and it needs to write a page to swap 
> then it will use the other channel.  Geoff's suggestion of 1GB for swap
> isn't bad.  The old rule of thumb was twice the physical - but disks are
> so big these days that partions that small look stupid.

I'm currently using a ~256MB swap partition. I gather from this
discussion that it's too small... although I personally haven't noticed
any problems. (At least Linux isn't like Windows, which seems to prefer
using the disk over the actual memory, blah).

> Hope to see you soon (this Thursday)

As I say, I probably can't make it this Thursday. What times do you
meet?

*slaps himself - look it up on the website, you lazy fool*

Oh, and about what somebody said about learning Linux with another
distro - I'm not 'learning' it as such, I already know heaps about it. I
just haven't used it as my primary OS up 'til now. (I grew in my
knowledge trying to set Slackware 8.0 up to work with all my peripherals
- boy, that was educational...)

 - Ciaran.