Re: [Leica] OT: Red Hat Linux Help

[George Hartzell <hartzell@kestrel.alerce.com>]

Richard Wasserman writes:
 > Dear LUG,
 >     I am Richard Wasserman's son, Joe.  I'm trying to install Red Hat
 > Linux and need some help.  When trying to partition disk space on my
 > hard drives ( I have two; a smaller, 4 GB master drive and a 40 GB slave
 > drive), do the root  ("/"), "/boot", and "<swap> all have to be on the
 > same drive?  Also, what should I have the slave drive partitioned as?  I
 > tried to partition it as root, but it wouldn't let me, because root was
 > being used on the other drive.  So far, those are the only problems I've
 > had...  BTW, I'd like to not have to use a boot disk.

First, you'll have a much easier time if you're using a current
release.  Latest is 7.2, which I'm just starting to use.  The
installer had some trouble on a Dell Optiplex 8-something-or-other,
seemed to be related to doing graphical installs since a text based
(aka dos graphics) install went swimmingly.

Second question: Are you planning to dual boot the machine w/ another
OS (freebsd, windows, ...)?  I'll assume not, but can go on a length
about it if necessary.

If I were in your shoes, here's how I'd think about it.  The cool
thing about having multiple disks is that you can have activity
happening on both of them at the same time.  How successfully you can
achieve this depends on many things, but it's still the basic guiding
principle.  So, you'd want to split things out that might be accessed
at the same time.  /boot is only used at boot time, when there's not
much else going on.  Some machines have limitations about what portion
of the disk they can boot off of (e.g. w/in the first 1024 cylinders),
so I tend to make /boot small and towards the front of the disk.  Even
if you have a more modern machine, it's a good habit.  Interleaving
swapping activity across multiple devices is a good idea, so you could
put a swap partition on each disk.  In your situation, I'd think of /
as two filesystems.  / itself I'd put in a partition on the first
drive, and let all of the system stuff live there.  Then I'd make a
partition for /home, and possibly a second one for /usr/local on the
big disk and use them for your scratch work.

So, you end up with:

Disk 1
   /boot   primary partition 
   extended partition
      swap  256meg
      /     the rest of the disk

Disk 2
   extended partition
      swap 256meg
      /home  20gig
      /usr/local 20-ish gig

And that'd work.

The only shortcoming with this layout is that it requires that both
disks be running to have full functionality (at least if you put
anything interesting in /usr/local.  An alternative would be to not
explicitly make a /usr/local (so that it'd fall in the / partition)
and either let /home take up most of the 40gig disk, or break out
another partition (e.g. /projects) to share that disk.

I'd be happy to bounce ideas around if you're thinking of trying
something different.

g.

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