[Sussex] Hello!

[Steve Dobson]

Hi Ciaran

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 03:01:52PM +0000, Ciaran Hamilton wrote:
<snip>
> > 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. :(

After much discussion (check the archives) we finally settled on 
Horsham and Thursday.  Sorry but it's is very regular.  Maybe the
list is big enough now to support two meetings a month.  I suggest
the regular Thursday one in Horsham and a floating one that moves
about for those that have a problem with Thrusday evening and Horsham.
 
> > > > 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...

That depends upon your distro.  If you use Debian (and I guess Gentoo 
does something similar) then /home and /use/local are never touched so
it isn't a problem.

> > 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. ;)

Far enough.
 
> [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?

No - anything but.  Because I was tought how to build a kernel from the
start I got in to the habit of un-taring it into /usr/src and then symlinking
linux to it.  Other kernel related packages followed (of course) like pcmcia-cs
and then habit grew.  But doing everything from home as your user account is
far from 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.

Agreed.  But if / gets trashed then your system isn't going to boot 
anyhow.

> 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. :)

Your wish is my command entry:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             962M   29M  884M   4% /
/dev/hda5             5.7G  703M  4.7G  13% /usr
/dev/hda6             3.8G  388M  3.2G  11% /var
/dev/hda7             9.4G  2.7G  6.3G  31% /home
/dev/hda8             7.4G  692M  6.3G  10% /usr/src

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

That still to close for me.

> 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).

Not really.  It depend what you're doing.  Some of the old swapping methods
on the old Unixs (BSD for example) had to have everything in memory backed
up by disk somewhere. Therefore non-static data-pages had to have a place in
swap before they could be loaded.  If I remember my Linux Internals the
Linux kernel doesn't work that way.

I believe that is why the *BSDs are more difficult to
port to small (embedded) devices - at least in the early days - don't track 
FreeBSD that much these days - I leave that to Neal.  

If you're not having problem then don't worry.  If you are re-partioning
your disk anyway then I would say that the minimum these days is twice
physical.

> 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...)

Strange - I've hear that about Slackware form others too.

Steve