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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Perfect timing for continuation of this
thread.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>My new ly builtPC (replacing Windows XP on a
ancient Dell) is home and I'm getting acquainted with a simple standard debian
Linux installation that is all-in-one-partition except for swap.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Now finalizing the partitioning design for the
"real" debian install.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>So the resumption of this thread, with tips on
partitioning, UEFI and SSD is most welcome !!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Ideas duly extracted from the messages for further
consideration.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Steve</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><B></B> </DIV>
<DIV><B>From:</B> <A title=talk@gtalug.org href="mailto:talk@gtalug.org">Russell
via talk</A> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=hugh@mimosa.com
href="mailto:hugh@mimosa.com">D. Hugh Redelmeier</A> ; <A
title=talk@gtalug.org href="mailto:talk@gtalug.org">GTALUG Talk</A> ; <A
title=talk@gtalug.org href="mailto:talk@gtalug.org">D. Hugh Redelmeier via
talk</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Tuesday, April 17, 2018 8:20
AM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [GTALUG] New Desktop PC --
debian Linux - Proposed 2 TB HDDPartitioning; </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>On April 11, 2018 7:02:56 PM EDT, "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"
<<A href="mailto:talk@gtalug.org">talk@gtalug.org</A>> wrote:<BR>>|
From: Giles Orr via talk <<A
href="mailto:talk@gtalug.org">talk@gtalug.org</A>><BR>><BR>>Clunk
Clunk Clunk (I'm nodding my head).<BR>><BR>>| I'm with Len - simplify if
you can. Although Unlike him, I believe<BR>>you<BR>>| should have
at least two (Linux) OS partitions - if one is messed up,<BR>>you<BR>>|
can boot from the other to fix it. And I've also - more than once
-<BR><BR>I also follow this practice. In fact in my current build, I'm looking
at overprovisioning my SSD using small fencing stripes. This would so as to be
able to gain several spaces on the disk which I could format in an emergency.
I can then recover a backup of the superblock and realign things. In theory
anyway.<BR><BR>>had to<BR>>| tinker with two OSes (usually Debian vs.
Fedora) to figure out which<BR>>worked<BR>>| best on a particular
machine. So I always have at least two OS<BR><BR>Currently I have two
versions of the same os on the same machine. One on M.2 Xpoint nvram and one
on a standard SSD. I'm playing around with tweaking before I do a final
config. So far the Xpoint direct hw access appears 3x as fast as the SSD while
real world throughput shows up about twice as fast on the Xpoint, recent INTEL
cache fencing notwithstanding.<BR><BR>dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 |
md5sum<BR>1024+0 records in<BR>1024+0 records out<BR>1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB,
1.0 GiB) copied, 1.35008 s, 795 MB/s<BR>cd573cfaace07e7949bc0c46028904ff
-<BR><BR>795 is just under twice as fast as writing to the conventional
SSD.<BR><BR>><BR>>I used to always have two / partitions for two
separate OSes. When a<BR>>new OS release came out, I always did a
fresh install into the other /<BR>>partition. This meant that the old
system could still be run. Now<BR>>I've gotten a bit lazy and do
upgrades in place. Still, having space<BR>>for a separate
installation is comforting.<BR>><BR>>Fedora seems to have been trustable
with upgrades-in-place for a few<BR>>years.<BR><BR>I'm currently on Fedora
27 with Gnome using the Nouveau driver. I usually never automatically update
but while I sort this new box and throughout the Spectre stuff, updates are
automatic. This release had both the gnome update notifier and dnfdragora
enabled by default which was confusing at first but I got used to
it.<BR><BR>>According to Lennart, debian has been trustable for a long long
time.<BR><BR>I was frozen at 2.6 on Debian till 2010 or so. I didn't
automatically upgrade during that time but as I recall when I did there were
few problems. Notably the introduction of pulse audio and ongoing issues with
xsane and colord profiles. Although recently I switched back to RH for myself.
I did this once it looked like SElinux was sorted in respect of systemd. I
made the switch, mostly to align myself more in keeping with FOSS
libraries.<BR><BR>><BR>>| And in the name of simplicity, each OS
partition includes its<BR>>| own /var, /usr, /usr/local ... the only
separate partitions are swap<BR>>and<BR>>| /home, because I want that to
be separate and accessible to each of<BR>>the OS<BR>>| partitions - and
separate and not affected by OS upgrades.<BR>><BR>>Superstitiously, I
won't let different distros share a /home. I fear<BR>>a conflicting
set of config files. I don't know that this is a<BR>>problem, I just
don't really want to find out.<BR><BR>When I first started my switch from DOS
to *nix, I was told you absolutely don't want to run two versions of init on
the same machine. I believe this is why userland programming uses telinit. It
seems to me that not letting different distros share a home is a pretty sound
idea, even if it is based on superstition.<BR><BR>I forget the exact reasons I
was given for always using telinit. However given the fine granularity and
ballistic nature of the bits and dword bytes, I assume that it could be
catastrophic to request pid1 and receive pid 1001. The audit trail to follow
for recovery would be hard to follow without being able to distinguish the id
as being from userland rather than kernelspace.<BR><BR>><BR>>For this
reason, I don't tend to let /home fill the drive. I
invent<BR>>another filesystem to occupy any spare space. Usually
/space.<BR><BR>I use /DATA, using caps is the way I remind myself, at a
glance, that I created the space. <BR>><BR>>| These days
it<BR>>| seems you want a /boot partition though - but I'm not the one
to<BR>>explain<BR>>| the ins and outs of that.<BR>><BR>>I've not
seen a use for a /boot partition.<BR>><BR>>With UEFI booting, you need a
separate EFI System Partition. This<BR>>will be shared by all systems
that boot off that drive. This gets<BR>>mounted on the mount point
/boot/efi. It will be some variant of FAT<BR>>but the partition type
will be distinct.<BR>><BR>>Technically you can have more than one EFI
System Partition on a drive<BR>>but don't do this. I did this by
accident and had a few problems.<BR><BR>Out of curiosity, could you say what
type of problems they were?<BR><BR>>Windows cannot handle this case and
firmware setup screens may be no<BR>>better. I don't know of any
upside.<BR>>---<BR>>Talk Mailing
List<BR>>talk@gtalug.org<BR>>https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk<BR><BR>--
<BR>Russell<BR>---<BR>Talk Mailing List<BR><A
href="mailto:talk@gtalug.org">talk@gtalug.org</A><BR><A
href="https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk">https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk</A><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>