Re: Preupgrade??

[Marcel Rieux]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Kevin J. Cummings <
cummings(a)kjchome.homeip.net&gt; wrote:

On 04/30/2010 05:31 PM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
>  >
>  >
>  > On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid(a)gmail.com
>  > <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>  >
>  >     On 05/01/2010 02:28 AM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
>  >     > On
>  >     > ===================
>  >     >
>  >     > Isn't it now possible to revert to not using a /boot partition and
>  >     > having the full / space for installation?
>  >
>  >     No.  Because while the latest GRUB in Fedora supports Ext4, it does
>  not
>  >     support booting from LVM.
>  >
>  >
>  > My /boot partition is 290 MB. Since the default is now 500MB is it
>  > necessary that I resize? Will /swap be used if necessary? I have 2 GB of
>
>  Necessary?  no.  But you may have problems upgrading if you don't have
>  enough storage in /boot for whichever upgrade method you choose to use
>  during the upgrade.
>  
I'm afraid there's a lot of stupid questions you'll have to forgive here,
but I'm completely lost.

As I said, I have 290 MB for /boot but, with the 3 past kernels installed, I
hardly use more that ¼ of it. When a new version of Fedora is installed, it
installs a new kernel and deletes, as usual, the oldest one. Why is much
space needed?


>  Me?  I recently deleted my LVMs and re-partitioned my F13 system with
> a
>  single / partitition (ext4) and a swap partition (instead of having a
>  /boot partition, now /boot is just a subdirectory of /.
>  
It seems to me this makes sense, except I'd also have a /home partition. Say
you have a 20GB partition for / on a desktop. Is there really much chance
that it will one day get filled and that there will be no cruft to remove? I
mean on a desktop...!

When you can get a 1TB HD for less than $100, is there any sense in trying
to cut the 20GB to 10 GB and having to use LVM?

Wikipedia says:

On small systems (like a desktop at home), instead of having to guess how
big a partition needs to be, LVM allows you to resize your disk partitions
easily as needed.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_%28Linux%29

Is LVM the default when you make a Fedora desktop installation? I hope not.
If it is, I believe I disabled it since, when I go into Logical Volume
Management, all partitions show: Uninitiated disk entity. Does LVM change
the way fstab looks?


>  Swap?  Non-sequitor.  /boot is file-system (disk) space. 

This goes with what I asked here:

"When a new version of Fedora is installed, it installs a new kernel and
deletes, as usual, the oldest one. Why is much space needed? "

I thought maybe, when a new version of Fedora is installed, that some
compiling operation are needed that occupy a lot of space in the /boot
partition, and that /swap could be temporarily be used. I'm afraid this does
not make much sense. The problem is I can't figure out what does.

>  Now, if you want to trade off some of your swap partition to add to
> your 
>  /boot partition, that *may* be do-able if the are adjacent on the
> disk,
>  
They are not. Countrary to what is most commonly suggested, long ago, I took
the habit to put swap at the end of the disk so that each revolution of the
HD read/writes more sectors, making swap more efficient. /boot is at the
beginning of the disk.

But, since I believe I don't use LVM, is there any way I can get rid of the
ext3 boot partition and use a /boot directory in / without doing a
back-up/restore?

The whole section between equal signs will be qualified by most here as an
unnecessary rant. Don't feel obliged to read it.

=================

I sometimes feel Linux is entering a Babel tower state of providing
solutions to problems by explaining concepts. When I began using Linux,
things were supposed to be more complex for the user. Still, after some
limited basic reading, how things worked was quite evident. Now, as the OS
gets both more complex and user-friendly, I read the documentation and I'm
completely lost. I can't grasp the concepts.

And, as a matter of fact, it's not only Linux, it's all the technology
field. For instance, I recently bought a little voice recorder with buttons
all over the place interacting one with the others. The little manual that
comes with it is about 40 pages long and it took me about 3 hours to figure
out how everything worked. (Expsoing this simple matter will prove a bit
longish, but it's the best illustration I can think of.)

For instance, a button for the microphone has:

Manual, Normal, Zoom

After the Recording and Playing section, there are two pages on recording
again, one of which explains that there's another Zoom setting in the Menus.
It just says that, in order to make this setting, the switch must be set to
Manual.

Heellloooowww? What the hell is this? Why is there another Zoom setting?
Does it make the Zoom Zoomier? No explanation of the concept anywhere.
What's teh difference between Manual and Normal?

> From the little experience I have in sound recording, I guessed that
> Normal 
and Zoom offer Automatic Volume Control, which can cause the background
noise to be amplified when the person you're recording is not speaking. With
manual, this won't occur but, if the person you're recording suddenly speaks
more softly, you might lose a few words. (OTOH, it seems you rise up the
volume without experiencing any distortion. Is there a limiter or is
distortion not possible with digital recording, I don't know. I'm used to
tape recording.)

So, what this really mean is the switch could have been like this:

           Manual                              Auto. Vol. Control
           /           \
/                            \
    Wide(1)        Zoom(1)            Wide(2)                   Zoom

(1) In fact chosen through a menu
(2) Called "Normal" on the switch

And it's like this all over the manual. You get from a recording section to
playing, back to recording, back to playing and every time there's an OFF
and ON option -- and that's something like 7 times! -- you're told that you
can must press this button to change from OFF to ON.

Dammit, this is just a voice recorder and, in the end, you get so dizzy that
it drives you nuts and you wonder if you got everything right.

Documentation hasn't always been so badly written. In 1966, I bought a
rangefinder camera and the little booklet that came with it was a real good
photography course, even getting into matters such as depth of field and how
to set the lens on hyperfocal for a given F-stop.

Nowadays, it is commonly accepted that anybody with a good knowledge of
english vocabulary is automatically a good writer. Geeks believe that if
what they write is very clear to them or any other geek, it must be clear to
anybody. They don't evaluate their background and that of their reader, and
on purpose, because if they did, they wouldn't know how to extract the
concepts from the tons of knowledge that they took years to acquire. They
fear that they'd have to go on explaining forever down to the most basic
stuff, which would make the exposé even more obscure.

Rhetoric is an art that isn't recognized any more. The greatest scientists
often don't possess it. For instance, Einstein wasn't able to properly
explain to the masses what the theory of relativity really meant. Lincoln
Barnett, a contemporary unknown physics teacher at Princeton, did a very
good job with The Universe and Dr Einstein. And Einstein did agree :) So
good that the little Penguin book, with all the pertaining equations at the
end, is not published any more by Penguin but has been reprinted by an
obscure publisher at a much higher price and I wouldn't swear about the
exactness of the text. (It certainly wasn't correct in the french version.)

Of course, maybe if documentation wasn't so confusing, less support would be
needed...

Ok, just my two cents on a subject that is, of course, totally unrelated to
Linux :)

=======================

I believe there should be a page on FedoraProject to explain how to get rid
of that ext3 /boot partition. Of course, for most people, I suppose it won't
be much of an issue for most users but, when a 500 MB boot partition is now
suggested for /boot -- which 25 times my first HD! --, it certainly doesn't
look very clean.

Maybe we can try to explain why so much space is needed -- only for LVM, or
for non-LVM too? -- and see what's the way of getting out of the way this
relic that will keep newcomers wondering and pondering at each upgrade for
years to come?