Simple HowTo
Michael A. Peters
mpeters at mac.com
Tue Dec 18 23:48:14 UTC 2007
On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 16:35 -0500, Gene Poole wrote:
> Hello everyone!
Hi
> The latest releases (Fedora 7 and 8) have moved away from the older
> IDE constructs (up to 15 partitions) to a more SCSI construct (up to
> 6(?) partitions). So all older definitions where we learned that one
> of the better installations defined specific file systems and mount
> points now must move to a more M$ C: drive mentality.
No. Drives are platform agnostic with respect to how they are
partitioned. The PC bios only supports 4 primary partitions regardless
of the type of drive. On PPC macs, you could have I think 15. I believe
Sun also allowed 16. It was the PC Bios that limited it to four, and
that was the case regardless of the drive interface. It's not a type of
drive issue.
Typically Linux installs would create 3 primary partitions - /boot,
swap, and the third would be chopped up into logical partitions.
Sometimes swap was a logical partition within a primary.
> If I want to
> avoid this I must use LVM so that I can define file systems for the
> entire tree.
No. I use LVM. I use one primary partition for /boot, one primary
partition for swap, and one primary partition for the LVM VG. In the
volume group, I have several logical volumes - one for /, and second one
for future / (so I can can do a clean install into a fresh root), one
for /home, on for /srv, one for /texlive, one for /mp3
What's really cool about LVM - if say I'm running out of room in /mp3
but I still have tons of space left in /home - I can shrink /home and
expand /mp3 - all without even rebooting. Try that with the old way of
using logical partitions inside a primary partition. It doesn't work.
Usually though what I do is leave a bunch of space unused in the Volume
Group. When I filesystem starts to get full, I then use the nice
graphical volume manager and add some of the unused space to that
filesystem, and I don't have to shrink squat.
What's really cool - if I'm out of space completely, I can add a second
physical drive, add its space to the volume group, and continue to
expand the file systems.
LVM rocks.
> I have no doubt that the RPMs contain all that are needed, except I
> can no longer control where it goes. You don't tell me where it's
> going to go ahead of time so I can make a file system large enough
> and named correctly (more C: drive mentality).
That's why you want to use LVM. You can adjust sizes of the file systems
as necessary.
> And I need to know
> this ahead of time so I can do the correct thing while in Disk Druid.
> In the FHS, where does it say that Apache HTTPD, Apache Tomcat,
> mod_jk, and the Sun Java should go?
Mostly in /usr
>
> Other Points:
> /opt and /usr/local are going to be defined regardless if you have
> built a separate file system for them or not. They are a part of the
> standard file hierarchy.
> Yum doesn't know nor should it know about software installed outside
> of it's environment. One great piece of software is jedit and there
> is no RPM for it - are you saying I shouldn't use it? There are a lot
> of good packages out there that aren't packaged in RPM format (jedit
> is a java program). The defacto standard for packages is .tar.gz
> I've used yum when it was only on the Yellowdog distro (yum =
> yellowdog update manager). I started in Linux when there was no RPM.
I like to build RPMs myself for most things I use that are not already
packaged.
For example - I found a cool project called viking (GPS related). No RPM
packages. So I wrote a spec file, and then contributed it. Now others
who do a svn checkout will have a spec file they can use to make an RPM
themselves
However, I generally prefer RPMs that other people have written,
whenever possible.
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