[GTALUG] New Desktop PC -- debian Linux - Proposed 2 TB HDD Partitioning;

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Wed Apr 11 19:02:56 EDT 2018


| From: Giles Orr via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

Clunk Clunk Clunk (I'm nodding my head).

| I'm with Len - simplify if you can.  Although Unlike him, I believe you
| should have at least two (Linux) OS partitions - if one is messed up, you
| can boot from the other to fix it.  And I've also - more than once - had to
| tinker with two OSes (usually Debian vs. Fedora) to figure out which worked
| best on a particular machine.  So I always have at least two OS

I used to always have two / partitions for two separate OSes.  When a
new OS release came out, I always did a fresh install into the other /
partition.  This meant that the old system could still be run.  Now
I've gotten a bit lazy and do upgrades in place.  Still, having space
for a separate installation is comforting.

Fedora seems to have been trustable with upgrades-in-place for a few years.
According to Lennart, debian has been trustable for a long long time.

|  And in the name of simplicity, each OS partition includes its
| own /var, /usr, /usr/local ... the only separate partitions are swap and
| /home, because I want that to be separate and accessible to each of the OS
| partitions - and separate and not affected by OS upgrades.

Superstitiously, I won't let different distros share a /home.  I fear
a conflicting set of config files.  I don't know that this is a
problem, I just don't really want to find out.

For this reason, I don't tend to let /home fill the drive.  I invent
another filesystem to occupy any spare space.  Usually /space.

|  These days it
| seems you want a /boot partition though - but I'm not the one to explain
| the ins and outs of that.

I've not seen a use for a /boot partition.

With UEFI booting, you need a separate EFI System Partition.  This
will be shared by all systems that boot off that drive.  This gets
mounted on the mount point /boot/efi.  It will be some variant of FAT
but the partition type will be distinct.

Technically you can have more than one EFI System Partition on a drive
but don't do this.  I did this by accident and had a few problems.
Windows cannot handle this case and firmware setup screens may be no
better.  I don't know of any upside.


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