(WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader???

[kain]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

oh ok

but why symlinks ?
say the "images" link, why not just mount the partition it points to as /home/images ? comes to the same don't it ?
(and the explorer would show u the images folder just like a reguler folder, non-italic)

[dibl]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

why not just mount the partition it points to as /home/images ? comes to the same don't it ?

Ahhh, this is where things get a little more subtle. YES, you could do that, but there's a better way, at least IMHO.

Suppose you have a nice big hard drive of, say, 1T in size. Label it "DATA". On that hard drive, you can (as root, or with "sudo" prefix) make directories, and set the user and group permissions to yourself. You might make "IMAGES", "DOCS", "VIDEOS", and "MUSIC", for example. Then, in /etc/fstab, you might make a mount line about like this:

UUID=c112ed57-0e33-4d4b-82c9-5c55932c529d   /mnt/DATA      ext4   auto,users,rw,exec,noatime          0  0

With the "DATA" hard drive mounted on /mnt/DATA, you have all your data directories available. Now you can symlink them individually into your /home/kain folder, just as you see that I have done.

So, no need for additional partitions -- just the one big one for your data directories.

[kain]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

whoops ok I missunderstood...when u said

Then I symlink my actual data in to my home folder, from other partitions where I keep it, and set those partitions to be mounted in /etc/fstab.

I figured u meant several partitions, like 1 for each folder (one for images, one for music, one for video......)

actually u make only 1 partition & put all the (real) data folders in there, right ? 8)



so anything in /home but outside those data folders contains the bad files like what u called the dot files ?

[dibl]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

actually u make only 1 partition & put all the (real) data folders in there, right ? 8)

so anything in /home but outside those data folders contains the bad files like what u called the dot files ?

Right -- now you are getting it.

The same home folder, with the "show hidden" option in Dolphin, looks like this:

[img width=290 height=400]http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/8352/homefolder1.png[/img]

Do you see all the folders and files that begin with a dot? Each of those represents custom user settings for a user package, or a desktop package or utility. If I ever want to reinstall a package, or reinstall the OS, I need to be aware that those dot files and folders need to go away, or else I will be forever stuck with whatever settings they are using. As you can see there are many packages represented. When I want to make a clean new installation, I don't necessarily want all of that prior setting stuff hanging on and causing me a lot of rework. If it were my real data partition, however, then that's exactly the problem I would have. That's why I symlink my user data in from a different drive/partition.

[kain]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

but wont a package/OS reinstall reset the config files anyway ? in which case no need to do manual removal
likewise uninstalling a package should delete the config files right ? (unless it's sh1tty package w/bad programming or something but I figured only Microsoft does that)

[dibl]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

No.

Do you have a spare hard drive partition? -- I think you're ready to start doing your own experiments.

[rfakhrai]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

yes all of this is not nearly as entertaining if you aren't doing your own experimentation!

[oshunluvr]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

Wow, what a discussion!

@kain: some of what you've read is old, very old.

Computer and linux time is ten fold faster than real-people time so advice that is six months old is like last decade stuff in real-people time. The reasons for the old ways are myriad; slow hard drives, small hard drives, slow cpus, lack of memory, etc... et.al.

So, take our advice, slow down just a bit, start simple and work your way forward. I have no doubt your learning curve will be steep but no reason to set yourself up for failure.

I have four hard drives on my main system. I have 7 bootable setups. I use RAID0 for some, not for others. I share /tmp but not /home. I share /home/videos, /home/music, /home/documents and others. I have a separate grub partition and a backup to it. I use four different file systems, maintain on and off line backups and the list goes on.

I left windows 15 years ago so I have a moderate level of experience so my advice comes with some level of expertise: If you're planning on multiple linux installs you'll be better off starting with a "main" install and using the others for testing. Once you're an expert in one, move to the next and so on. Don't leap into fancy grub setups until you're comfortable with linux. Comfortable means: You boot up and instead of your log in screen, you get a text log in - you don't panic, but instead fall into a list of procedures to figure out why and within a few minutes you know why you're where you are and what to do to fix it. Soon you'll get kernel panic or grub failures and you'll still be OK with it. THEN move into fancy stand alone grub partitions and exotic partition schemes.

Point is: Lots of budding linux users leap into the abyss and simply fall. Why not instead look at this journey as a climb up a mountain and take one step at a time until you can see the top?

Start with this (totally my own opinion):

Single drive partitions:
swap = laptop=RAM size, desktop 2GB or RAM size if less.
install = 12gb
install-backup = 12gb
install-trial = 12gb
home = 10gb to whatever
tmp = 4gb minimum up to 12gb if you do DVD rips or video processing

This allows a main install and a backup for it, a test install, home kept safe, tmp shared to save gb's. Attach the /home partition to your main and backup installs only. If you need access to data in your test installs, symlink to your /home subdirectories.

Once you've mastered this - we'll talk about RAID and grub partitions!

[kain]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

No.

Do you have a spare hard drive partition? -- I think you're ready to start doing your own experiments.

got hard drive on my netbook (250gb) and gonna put everything linux related into extended partition

so that gonna leave me 3 primary partitions, one o them for windows XP and the rest I can spare

Point is: Lots of budding linux users leap into the abyss and simply fall. Why not instead look at this journey as a climb up a mountain and take one step at a time until you can see the top?

nah theres no fail I aint using linux for useful stuff atm remember ? only expermienting and #&%$...so, if anything goes wrong I just keep reinstalling till it works



anyway I already did the partitions last night (I only did separate / /tmp /home & swap) but then got "grub error 2" or something...n it said the selected disk doesn't exist lol

maybe grub dont like modern hard drives ?

[dibl]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

If you are only installing a single Linux OS, there is no advantage to installing /tmp on its own partition. However, you can do it if you want.

So, you need to have 4 logical partitions in your extended partition:

/
/tmp
/home
swap

Assuming you have 4 partitions, you would use the "manual" partitioning mode of the Kubuntu Live or Alternate (my preference) CD, and you would set the installation partitions to be mounted on these mount points (swap is not really a mount point, it is just a filesystem type). When you get to the end of the process, and it asks to install Grub, you let it go to the default, which is the MBR of your hard drive. That should result in a bootable system.

[kain]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

actually I want multiboot with Windows XP (XP is for surfing & stuff) PLUS several Linux OS (one main Linux, plus reserved space for test OSs which I can partition further if needed)

btw I used gparted on my first try...but now I gonna use fdisk for all the partitioning I wanna do it all command line...everything



anyway what size for / (root) ? if I take oshunluvr's suggestion then root partition gonna be HUGE cause it contains everything cept /home & /tmp, so I figure maybe 50Gb or something...

[dibl]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

It looks like oshunluvr is suggesting 6 logical partitions within your extended partition, to support installation of 3 different OSs, with a shared swap, and a shared /tmp, and a shared /home (note that I previously pointed out the potential disadvantage of sharing /home).

Depending on which distributions you are looking at, a typical OS installation will initially use 4GB, and then will tend to grow over time as you add packages -- perhaps to 5GB or a bit more. So if you allow 6GB for each OS, and plan to manage it by cleaning downloads periodically, you should be fine.

[oshunluvr]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

50gb is way too big for a linux install - unless you install everything available (does any really need five different image viewers?). My server uses about 2.5gb, my desktop about 9.5gb. I would say 15gb is plenty even if you don't separate /tmp. /home is always the largest partition. With 250gb's

WinXP 50-80gb
linux 1,2,3 12gb each
swap 2-4gb
tmp 6gb

leaves you 146 to 124gb for home - again plenty

I wonder how much room you'd need to install everything

@dibl: I only advocate sharing /home between a main install and it's cloned backup install if one is kept. Otherwise, symlinks to the data subdirectories are a better choice - as I know you'd agree

[dibl]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

@dibl: I only advocate sharing /home between a main install and it's cloned backup install if one is kept. Otherwise, symlinks to the data subdirectories are a better choice - as I know you'd agree

Yes, I do!

So, don't mount the partition on /home in any of your OS installations, just install all of the OS except /tmp in its own partition for each distribution. Then you can symlink your data in from a common (large) data partition which is your sixth partition.

[vinnywright]

Re: (WARNING Linux newbie here) WHY a separate partition for bootloader

I wonder how much room you'd need to install everything

A LOT ..................muon shows 31,349 packages avalable........I have 2,502 installed that makes my / ..........

vinny@desktop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3 20G 7.8G 11G 43% /
none 987M 336K 986M 1% /dev
none 991M 0 991M 0% /dev/shm
none 991M 232K 991M 1% /var/run
none 991M 0 991M 0% /var/lock
none 991M 0 991M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb5 130G 79G 45G 65% /home
vinny@desktop:~$

out of this layout

vinny@desktop:~$ sudo parted
[sudo] password for vinny:
GNU Parted 2.2
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print all
Model: ATA MAXTOR 6L040J2 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 40.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 40.0GB 40.0GB primary ext4


Model: ATA WDC WD2000JD-22H (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 200GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
2 32.3kB 4680MB 4680MB primary fat32
1 4680MB 37.0GB 32.3GB primary ntfs boot
3 37.0GB 58.2GB 21.2GB primary ext3
4 58.2GB 200GB 142GB extended
5 58.2GB 199GB 141GB logical ext3
6 199GB 200GB 1135MB logical linux-swap(v1)


(parted)

sda is a drive I added after the fact for testing OS's !! and it became sda but thanks to UUID's nothing became unbootable when the drives changed /dev points.



VINNY