Partitioning [Was: Libranet]
Duston, Hal
hdusto01 at sprintspectrum.com
Mon Apr 30 17:14:22 CDT 2001
Jonathan Hutchins, Rune Webmaster [hutchins at therune.com] wrote:
> There's a whole recommended partitioning scheme for Linux.
> It's possible to install it to a single partition, but
> usually you'll want to add a swap partition. From there,
> most installations make the strange assumption that you're
> building a server that will have multiple users (like
> SkyNet user shells), and make the biggest allocation under
> the user home directories.
This is actually quite useful even with a single user system.
I am beginning to set up a separate user for every individual
project or task I am doing under Linux. I.e. I have a kernel
user for doing kernel development, a user for every program I
am writing, etc. This provides good barriers for projects to
not interfere with each other. Also having an isolated /home
partition provides an additional layer of protection when you
upgrade your distribution. You can umount it and feel fairly
safe that the upgrade won't touch any files there.
> After that, some like to allocate
> a chunk of space to user installed software, and/or
> software that wasn't part of the distribution.
>
> If you follow the latter scheme, you have something like
> what you're looking for - the original "system"
> installation is separate/protected from user data and
> add-on software.
And vice-a-versa. Again "user" installed software ought to go
in /usr/local/ which is for packages _not_ managed by the your
distribution's package management system, and any package that
_is_ managed by the distribution would go wherever the package
puts it. This keeps the distribution from messing with "user"
installed things, since /usr/local/ is off limits for distros.
> The line between the OS itself and the "remaining goodies"
> is drawn differently by different people, but it's not
> particularly unusual to put the OS Kernel in it's own
> partition.
The /boot partition is normally used IIRC to work with systems
that can't load anything past cylinder 1024. You make a small
partition at the front of the disk, and put whatever is needed
by your bootloader there.
>
> Unless you have an unusual assortment of available
> partitions for some reason, just pick a favored distro and
> go with their install recommendations. As you learn the
> system you will know if you want to change, and you can do
> so later if you like.
This is of course completely correct.
Hal Duston
hald at sound.net
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