partition structure

[acowboydave]

Hello, I have read many ways and how to do it, but I want it right. Had an old gateway given to me it was suppose to be a throw away. It crashed all the time with win 98se on it. Well I installed VL 5.8 gold on it and really like it alot. It's a gateway 433c 256 Ram, 10 GB HD, 432 mhz. intell AC 97 i810 Driver, intell 82810 cgc graphic rev.3, nvidia nv11 GeForce mx mx 400 rev. b2. I dedicated the HD to linux but I don,t know if I did it right.  0 to 199 mb boot, primary hda1, 200 to 8000 mb primary hda2, 8001 to 9000 was wrote #82 linux swap, rest was left as freespace. Is this far off or incorrect. Any help or advice will be put to use, thanks 

[MikeCindi]

There are many ways to do this and personal preference will ultimately guide you to a final scheme. I would personally not use a /boot unless you use a distro that "requires" it. Vector does not. Thus I typically have a swap partition of varying size but conventional wisdom is 2x RAM so in your case 512Mb. Then the root partition of the rest of the HD unless you want a separate /home which I usually use. I generally do about 60% root and 40% home (I keep most of my "important" files on a external drive so I need much less space on /home). Also FWIW I use reiserfs for the root and usually for home but have been experimenting with xfs. (I don't use xfs for root as it complains during setup when loading lilo.)
HTH,
Mike

[Triarius Fidelis]

Also FWIW I use reiserfs for the root and usually for home but have been experimenting with xfs. (I don't use xfs for root as it complains during setup when loading lilo.)
HTH,
Mike

I'm not at my box now. Is XFS enabled as a module or core kernel code in Vector?

I use ReiserFS now (Free Hans!), but honestly, I wish I had just gone with ext3. I don't think I would notice much a difference anyway, plus ext3 has some more interesting utilities; you can, for instance, set a file to be immune to rm!!

[Joe1962]

All installer-selectable file systems are built into the kernel. And yes, that means xfs too...

[acowboydave]

Hello, thought I should answer back to the question I posted. After researching a little more, Mike I took your advice. Partitioned the hard drive as follows, hda1, is my linux swap at 512 mb. hda2, the rest of hd was used for linux reiserfs, have a 4g usb stick which I will use for added hd space. Have to say I am impressed with VL, thanks for the help Mike, hope this is the right structure you where pointing me too. I did install reisersf instead of old linux root. Next step is to carefully update, need to read up more on this.

[MikeCindi]

I believe you won't be disappointed with VL as it is an excellent distro (the best for me at least).

[Triarius Fidelis]

All installer-selectable file systems are built into the kernel. And yes, that means xfs too...

That reminds me:

The spell check I did for vinstall also consistently includes XFS as an option for non-root filesystems.

[MikeCindi]

I've used XFS for / several times with VL. The only problem that I noted was with putting the boot loader (grub or lilo) in the superblock of that partition (if MBR was used then no problem). Since the install script(s) would not allow this, giving a warning or error, I would then have to finish the install and use the CD to boot into the newly installed VL and manually "force" grub or lilo into the superblock of the partition.

[Triarius Fidelis]

Is it much better than ext3 / reiser et al.?

I can see where it would be useful for hosting something like Wikipedia, but I wonder what benefit the Average Joe like me would get other than my pr0n collection loading in gqview 5 nanoseconds faster.

[Joe1962]

I would then have to finish the install and use the CD to boot into the newly installed VL and manually "force" grub or lilo into the superblock of the partition.

This is not wise. This is from the official XFS FAQ:

Q: Does LILO work with XFS?

This depends on where you install LILO.

Yes, for MBR (Master Boot Record) installations.

No, for root partition installations because the XFS superblock is written at block zero, where LILO would be installed. This is to maintain compatibility with the IRIX on-disk format, and will not be changed.

[Triarius Fidelis]

Whoa? How did he not trash the filesystem? It's like XFS has superblock ganglia.

[MikeCindi]

Don't know the in's and out's of why it worked but it did and is still working on my server...perhaps eventually I will have a problem but after several months VL 5.8 Std is still Gold . On my laptop I use reiserfs for my root partition and until my USB HD died recently I used XFS for my /home partition. I really like reiserfs and had hoped that reiser4 would've made it to production (but murder charges put an end to that along with several distros jumping ship on even reiserfs as their default fs). I like the concept of XFS using fewer CPU resources and being faster with large file transfers (>1Gb which most of the home video files I have are many times that size). I can't say that I've really noticed a difference though. Now I just have reiserfs on my laptop...