partition management in dual-boot laptop / limited space

[Ian Malone]

On 6 January 2016 at 22:14, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> You could use LVM thin p for / and /home.
>
> The advantage is LV sizes are virtual, and can be larger than the VG. So
> it's an on demand pool of extents, assigned when needed by whichever LV.
>
> The installer won't let you over commit though. So what you do is create
> only / and set that volume size to a practical max. Post install create a
> new LV for /home and make it also a practical max size. The combined root
> and home can exceed the space in the VG.
>
> The gotcha is if the actual combined used space in those two for systems
> exceeds the pool size. That'll break things.
>
> But in the meantime it obviates filesystem resize. If you set to a practical
> max you won't need to grow an fs. And if you want to shrink, just use fstrim
> and unused extents will be returned to the pool. It's actually a lot more
> efficient and safe than fs resize.

Thanks, that would be a nice solution if I could get it to play well
with NTFS, on the other hand might be combined with the VBox shared
folders Jon mentioned. Have always been a bit wary of
over-provisioning for the reason you mention, but in my experience the
/ size is fairly stable once you've got the system set up as needed.
(Still a few problems running a virtual machine for windows in this
particular case of course, but I'm also interested in knowing what
things are possible.)

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk