Xubuntu pre-install questions

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Mon Apr 23 13:22:28 UTC 2007


On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 10:10:14PM -0400, Ian Petersen wrote:
> My system at home has a 2 Gig / and everything else is on LVM volumes.
> When I say everything else, I mean /home, /opt, /tmp, /usr, /var,
> etc.  I find this setup to be very flexible.  I leave /bin and /sbin
> on the same partition that holds / so I can boot to a mostly-usable
> system even without LVM.
> 
> As for a swap partition, I'd recommend using a swap file instead.  In
> 2.6 kernels the speed difference between swap partitions and swap
> files is negligble to non-existant but swap files are much more
> flexible because you can add and remove them as you see fit.
> 
> Regarding filesystems, I'm partial to ReiserFS, but I hear that
> version 3 (the only stable version) is basically in maintenance mode
> and that there are some fundamental problems with it.  (I don't
> remember the details but SuSE, who used to use ReiserFS by default,
> has switched away from it.)  I think ext3 is the standard these days.
> I think both ext3 and ReiserFS can be resized while the filesystem is
> mounted, which is a big boon if you're using LVM and want to resize
> one of your logical partitions.

reiserfs3 is also the only filesystem to ever cause me to loose data due
to serious file corruption.  I am never using that again and I highly
discourage other people from using it.  It's handling of any kind of
error seems to be a disaster.

> One caveat is that the system I'm describing is Gentoo, so most of the
> user-ish binaries end up in /usr/bin so I'm not really at risk of
> running out of space on /.  I don't know where Xubuntu puts things so
> you may need a bigger / partition.  I'd expect both distros to mostly
> adhere to the filesystem hierarchy standard, though, so I'd just go
> ahead with 2 Gigs if it were me.

If /usr is a seperate partition, then most things will be going there.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list