partition customization ....how do I ???

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 04 March 2010, birger wrote:
>On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 10:35 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> What disk docs?  The only thing they put in the box these days is the
>> legal disclaimers. As for the bios, well, its an ASUS, what can I say. 
>> The latest bios update took 3 burns before it worked right.
>
>Most resellers only push OEM-packaged disks, as customers want them
>cheap. OEM means it's packaged for customers who don't need the manual.
>You have to download it yourself. No big problem, is it?
>
>> First error, recommending DD.  It will not allow a /boot partition to
>> exceed 199 megabytes.  My present, and fully functional /boot is 400. And
>> its 56% used.  I should to some housekeeping I guess. Delete the old
>> 2.6.32 kernels, they are so old hat in 2010.
>
>I just installed RHEL 5.4 today. It let me set up a 400MB /boot without
>any problem. I have never had any problem tweaking /boot to any desired
>size.

That's fine, and just points out to those who are shifting powder from one 
pan to the other to keep things balanced, that difference to me, is just an 
annoyance to make the RHEL version a more stable version.  Feature crippling 
isn't new, heck, how many decades has M$ been doing it.  Note lack of 
question mark, its a statement.  As to that limit, I first encountered it at 
fedora 6, 2 didn't have that fedora special feature, but it had other warts 
in its disk configuration that made me reinstall after setting it up with 
fdisk and then assigning what to where.  Now you cannot even do that as it 
moves things around with little (sensible) reason discernible to me.

[...]

>That depends on how your system uses swap. I prefer mine not to. Just
>add enough memory :-) If you must swap, get a nice SSD drive for that.

I have 4Gb, typical use is half a gig.  But 2.6.33 is a bit better, in a week 
htop only shows 29 megs of swap in use.

>> Some folks forget that not all of us are escapees from the M$ camp.  I
>> was carving code for an RCA 1802 in the late 70's, and by the mid-80's
>> had 'graduated' to a multi-user, multi-tasking os, writing what I needed
>> in several languages including assembly.
>
>We old-timers must not forget that times are a-changing. Hardware
>evolves. Old truths die. We must never think that just because we had
>the answers yesterday we still have them today.

Sorry, I deal, and have dealt, with the physical laws of the universe to make 
a living in electronics for the last 60 odd years.  There are some truths 
that only can be changed by rewinding things back to the big bang & starting 
with new rules.  Next time around maybe neutrino's will have an easily 
measured mass, and the higgs boson will be a bowl of breakfast cereal.  Maybe 
the arrow of time will point both ways too.  But that isn't going to happen 
on either of our watch's.

>Me, I think that keeping my system simple enough that I can upgrade
>often gives me better performance than trying to tweak everything. Let
>there be as few surprises for the updates as possible.
>
And with a couple of exceptions, one machine does whatever _I_ want it to do.  
OTOH, even my milling machines controlling computer browses the web, and 
participates in the IRC channels for that particular software, so in that 
sense it is not a single purpose machine.  Its fully capable of carving steel 
while I'm discussing mist coolants for it on IRC.

>On my netbooks, F11 and F12 have been definitive improvements over F10.
>On my far more powerful laptop with SSD the readahead stuff took the
>time from grub starts until login screen is ready to < 10 seconds. Thats
>faster than vista wakes from hibernation on the same hardware.

Quite possibly nice, but 3 of the 5 machines here never sleep.  They have 
something to do even when I'm catching some zz's.

>I prefer spending my energy going forward instead of fighting old bugs.
>
>birger

So do I Birger.  But sitting here on the sidelines watching the infant 
mortality rate of F11, then F12, and now F13's beginnings, makes me very very 
glad I haven't yet embarked on that path.  I also have 2 other, more recent 
installs of mint, &   mdv, both in 64 bit since this is a quad phenom.   They 
have both drunk deeply of the pulseaudio koolaid.  I can get audio from only 
one of the pulse choices on mdv, and that is a wide open, blow the speakers 
out in the yard, right after 2 layers of thermal glass, no volume control 
anyplace and I have kmix configured to show everything, so it has to be drug 
back and forth about 18" just to show all the sliders on the screen, 20 at a 
time.  Mint 8, has yet to make a peep, although in its case I do hear the 
thump when udev runs during the boot.  Here on F10 pulse is disabled, and 
_everything_ Just Works(TM).  And it works because _I_ can control the 
configuration in my modprobe.conf, once, and it is not ignored.

So I build a new snapshot of amanda every night to test it, and its working 
nicely, thanks for asking, and I usually build linus's kernels and run them 
starting at about -rc2 of each series, currently a weeks uptime on 2.6.33.  
But then I'm currently watching lkml, and the most heated discussion is the 
new nvidia driver.  Makes me glad I gave up on the big N 3 years ago, so that 
isn't going to effect my machine, but fedora officially has a very large 
basket of rattlesnakes to sort.  Me, I'll sit and wait for the dust to 
settle, its a bit thick in the forward direction for me right now.

Take care and stay well.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

There is no security on this earth.  There is only opportunity.
		-- General Douglas MacArthur