One last (I hope) update for now, and a little clarification for those not following all the posts, and those that may venture here later: ... >> I'm looking at this: > > > > / 2 GB > > /boot 140 MB > > /opt 500 > > /tmp 1 GB > > /usr 2 GB > > /var 2.76 GB > > /home 5 GB/balance > > swap 500 MB > >
This was initially for a knoppix installation, to ease my way into debian. That was a mistake. Knoppix will be great for me in the future as a portable debian, or as a rescue disk, but it bites for a hard disk install. I went through three attempted installs last night of Knoppix. For anyone wanting to try this, unless there has been changes since this post date, Knoppix REQUIRES at least 2.2 GB in / PERIOD. End of sentence/statement. It dumps EVERYTHING into /. I'd make it a bit bigger, just to be on the safe side, like 2.3 or 2.4 GB. Since all the directories are under /, and this is ill advised for linux in case of bad blocks, problems in a particular partition, performance issues, new installations while saving home, and so on, once the install is finished, you need to move the directories to the other partitions. Since I haven't done this before, I'll just guess: Mount other partitions made prior to distro install, then dd (?) the directories over to the other partitions? Can this be done while running the os that you plan on moving? How else to do this? Then rewrite fstab (and mtab?) to reflect changes, then reboot? The Knoppix installer doesn't allow you to split up the hard disk into separate partitions, or it just isn't documented, and ctrl/alt/F2,3,4 doesn't work at the point of choosing hard disk/partition. It just asks you which disk, is this the partition you want to make / (second question after which disk), and does it have 2,200 MB of space? No? Exit. Yes, copy packages. So while you can move the directories post install, you're stuck with a 2.2+GB / partition. Real dumb. And btw, no help on irc knoppix, and mailing list is very low volume. I'm getting much better help here, contrary to the flame warnings I've read about. Thanks again. Another thing. While Knoppix (and one of the developers or supporters) purports to support ReiserFS, it's installer doesn't. If it isn't there prior to the install, the installer doesn't include ReiserFS as an option. It has a kitchen sink option, but no ReiserFS option. I've been happily using the knoppix disks to try out debian (and I'm switching from rpm based after the experience), but suffice it to say that you shouldn't try installing knoppix on to a hard disk when the server room is under construction, and sledgehammers are laying around... Why is boot so large? I think I posted that when someone broke the thread, but I'll repeat. I have compiled a few kernels in the past, so I wanted to leave a little room there. But the major reason is that I've installed Suse many times in the past, and if boot is too small, it won't install the ReiserFS. It will install ext2 and ext3, but under a certain size, it won't install ReiserFS, and then you have to start over. So apparantly according to Suse, ReiserFS needs more space (at least at 7.3/8.0 versions, later versions may not have this requirement). And Suse has a better implementation of ReiserFS, as they make mods to the kernel that doesn't require a reboot after partitioning and prior to the filesystem installation, unlike virtually all other distros. This is explained on Hans' site, and was news to me when I ended up reading it because I had to mkreiserfs manually instead of doing it through the knoppix installer as it should be. I actually ended up installing a minimal suse 7.3 system to get the reiserfs installed correctly, and to make / big enough, prior to installing knoppix (four times!). This is one of the limitations of the docs for all the distros, and the how tos. How much space is used in each directory, when you install everything/file server setup/desktop setup/minimal setup. Just knowing this would have saved me last night, and at half a dozen installfests. Suse sticks it in opt. Knoppix sticks it in /, Debian sticks it... Red Hat sticks it in usr (if I remember correctly?). And the ram/swap question needs a fresh answer. Twice ram? 1.5x ram? Equal to ram? No swap? I have a half gig ram in my desktop. Should I have a gig of swap? That's what I did. Linux never touches swap? Really? On my suse desktop, linux pages out all the swap except about 5MB or so (I keep a lot of desktop apps running for weeks at a time, including about 20-40 browser sessions), so I have 512 MB of ram, and 1 GB of swap, with almost all the swap taken up. What should it have been? 512 MB ram/512 MB swap? 512 MB ram/ 256 MB swap? Where is this in the docs? 1/2 of ram? What happens when I upgrade my desktop to 2 GB of ram? How much swap? Or 4 GB? My os and my motherboard support the memory. How much swap? What about when I get my hands on an opteron and ram exceeds 4 GB? Time to bring the how-tos and docs into the new Millenium to reflect current ram memory use. Right now, it's a guessing game for me and others, and I don't have a guru to tap on the shoulder to bother with these types of questions. Partitioning and swap/ram needs better docs. I think I've finally found something I can contribute to. Sorry for the long-winded rant. It's been a long 36 hours. And as for knoppix on hard disk, forget it. I'm going to force myself onto a straight debian install from the bf2.4 disk, and work from there. I'm changing my partitions back to something more reasonable. And anyway, my knoppix disks are in little pieces after last night... Thanks for the help. And for disproving the warnings about this list. bing. > > Should swap be larger with 128 MB Ram, dealing with 700 MB+ iso images > > (my burner is on this box). > > AFAIK the guide to the size of swap is the amount of RAM: make it equal to > or twice that amount. By that standard you can cut down swap at least to > half what you now plan to make it. I don't know if Linux would like to > fill swap space with the iso image when a cd burner is busy but I doubt it. > > > Did I make opt too small? > > Only you may know. What would you want to put into it? It is true that > by default there is no /opt in a Debian installation, but you can decide > to have a policy of having an /opt for at least a certain class of > applications, and if you want a separate partition for /opt you must make > an estimate of the amount of disk space such applications will need. > > Further: > > /boot can be much smaller (I agree with Jose on that), because it needs > only to provide space for a couple of kernel images; > > / can probably be much smaller too, because what is to be on it that > really takes space other than /lib, /dev, /bin, /sbin, /etc, /root? > On my laptop these directories only take 32 Mb. That may be on the > low end of the spectrum for this total, but to me it looks hard to > make it rise to 2 Gb. > > Ben -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
