[conspire] Creating Home Partition

[Edmund J. Biow]

>
> Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 17:20:29 -0700 From: Rick Moen
> <rick at linuxmafia.com>
>
> The article shows it being created as a logical partition. However
>   
>> > when I do it using gparted the 2 choooses are primary and extended and
>> > logical is grayed out. 
>> > Hdb1  Kanotics 17gb
>> > Hdb2  Swap     500 mb
>> > Hdb3  Ubuntu   20gb
>> >   I read that logical partitions are contained within extended
>> > partitions. Should I use primary or extended  for the free space.
>>     
>
> Since you're aiming to have only four filesystems total, on that
> physical drive, make life easy for yourself, and stick to primary.
>   

My quibble about just creating a fourth primary partition is that it
doesn't leave as much flexibility to monkey with the file system later
as creating an extended partition and then a single logical partition.
At some point you might want to sub-divide /home or mount /var, /tmp,
/mnt or some other bit on a separate partition. 

Also, a 40 GB drive is pretty tight for 2 operating systems and user
files (he says typing this on his laptop with XP, SUSE 10.2 & Xubuntu
Edgy in 40 GB).  You might want to move to a larger drive in the
future.  Seems like a fast, easy way to do that would be to 'dd
if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc' which seems to go a little more quickly than
rsync and copies over the master boot record and grub.  But if you have
four primary partitions you can't do much with the extra space on the
newer, bigger drive.  However if you have an extended partition it seems
to me that you'd be able to just define a new logical partition to use
the extra space that the new drive provides (though I haven't tried this
yet).  I've never messed up a partition using a partition resizer,
though I'm sure it happens all the time (back up your data).
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Thu, 3 May 2007 21:43:04 -0700
> From: "David E. Fox" <dfox at m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Creating Home Partition
>
> On Thu, 3 May 2007 17:20:29 -0700
> Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> > 1.  Boot a maintenance disk (e.g., live CD).
>> > 2.  Use your favourite tool to nondestructively shrink /dev/hdb1, leaving 
>> >     some unallocated space on /dev/hdb.[1]
>>     
>
> Agreed that seems to be the way to go about it.. but I did bring up
> (privately) to John that I wasn't sure if the new partition could live
> in the middle (going by logical cylinder numbers) between hdb1 and hdb2
> (i.e., overlap). Of course if that's possible then it isn't an issue,
> otherwise he'd have to move everything around, or delete and remake
> partitions after the (new) /dev/hdb2.
>   
I recently set up Ubuntu Feisty on a house mate's relatively new
Thinkpad that had come with XP but a coupon to upgrade to Vista.  He'd
upgraded it to Vista when it came out and the system had sda1 with ~55
GB NTFS for Vista and sda2 with a 5 GB vfat partition which Vista
couldn't even read that had XP restoration data.  He left the machine
with me overnight and I didn't want to slag the vfat partition in case
Vista took a dive and he needed to quickly restore Windows.  I didn't
think partitioning would work, resizing sda1.  I'd read that Vista had
made changes to NTFS that made it impossible to resize with Linux
utilities and that you should resize from within Vista itself.  I tried,
and Vista wouldn't let me resize the partition, so I figured we have to
blow away sda2 in order to repartition it.  But just for grins I decided
to run the Feisty installer and see what it made of the situation.  I
was VERY impressed, Feisty's installing resized the partition and
allowed me to create two extra partitions between sda1 & sda2, a 7 GB
EXT3 '/' and a 250 MB swap partition (which was probably unnecessary,
the guy has 1.5 GB of DDR2).  I figure if he grows in to Linux we can
format the 5 GB vfat partition and use that as a home partition in the
future.

Impressions of Vista:
1. It seemed a little slower and less responsive than XP, particularly
moving, deleting or copying files.

2. The layout of menus and stuff seemed better than XP, but still not as
functional as Windows 2000 or 98.  For instance it seemed to have a
Quick Launch bar by default.  Of course it is customizable, so you can
restore the classic 'expert' layout if desired.

3. Outlook Express got a decent upgrade to Windows Mail, which has a
calendar.  Windows Media Player is still a slow, annoying pig. Still no
tabs (that I was able to discover) in the file manager, which doesn't
seem very configurable at first glance.

4. Networking with Linux was a bit of a pain.  I had to use the
Microsoft Management Console in order to read my Samba shares.  Mapping
the drives didn't seem to seemlessly reconnect after a reboot.  I had to
search for shares again which took a long time and reconnect manually. 
The first time I tried to reconnect after a reboot I had to reenable
file sharing, though subsequent reboots didn't require it.  The shares
only worked when I was hooked up to an ethernet cable, even though I
could ping the Linux hosts just fine when only connected via WPA-PSK. 
I'm sure if I messed around with it a bit I could get all these problems
worked out, but out of the box it was a much less pleasant experience
than Ubuntu.

In contrast, Feisty reconnected to the network shares that I defined for
him in the FSTAB even though the wireless stuff wasn't working when he
first booted up until he manually chose the connection and entered his
password wallet PW.  I'm sure there is a way to automatically reconnect
to a WPA-PSK network at boot, but I didn't have time to configure it.

5. The visuals were not very impressive to me, after messing with Linux
3D and compositing window managers for a year.  I don't think my friend
messed with the default settings at all and I didn't really care for the
way translucency was configured, there was a transparent section between
the bar at the top of an application and the menu bar which made it
confusing to tell where one application ended and another began when
there were several windows open.  I'm sure you get used to it or can
change that behavior.  Still no cube or multiple desktops, no way (that
I saw) to make an application translucent or zoom in on a chunk of real
estate or peel away an application to see what is underneath. 

6. It crashed!  I couldn't believe it, Vista is supposed to be more
stable than XP/W2K, which very rarely go balls up.  And the way it
crashed was really stupid.  The default Firefox behavior is to
automatically save everything to the desktop and we were downloading a
bunch of files and things were getting cluttered, so I went in to
Firefox and told it to ask me where to save files (I also like the
option of renaming files as I save them, since a lot of Windows
executables have ambiguous names like setup.exe).  Normally, the next
time I save a file I'll point Firefox at a documents folder or create a
download directory.  However some times I forget and just hit OK and it
saves to a new default location.  In Linux that is the
~/.mozilla/firefox/profile/$PROFILE directory, stupid and confusing, but
no harm done.  In Windows Firefox tries to save to c:\Program
Files\Firefox, even less intuitive, but no harm done.  With Vista it
tried to do that, saving in to the c:\Application directory structure
and after the file had finished downloading and tried to materialize
from the cache the OS froze up tight.  No mouse, no keyboard, no pinging
it from another machine, just a hard reboot.  I don't even think it was
the infamous Vista "tilt bit" in action. 
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=28793&messageID=537882&start=26

7.  About 20 GB just seem to be "missing" from his Vista partition, even
after making all files visible with Explorer and using some sort of
Treesize utiltiy to look over the file system.  I suspect that the OS is
just hiding the entire old XP OS somewhere.  It was also weird to me
that the Disk Management MSC wouldn't let me assign a drive letter to
the vfat rescue partition so I could browse it.  I'll suggest to my
buddy that he look over the partition from Ubuntu and see if he can
figure out where the missing space is lurking.  The upshot was, to leave
10 GB for Vista to expand I could only assign a frugal 7 GB to Linux and
hence couldn't make a home directory in case he wants to install KDE and
XFCE at some point (he's using about 3.8 GB now).

A lot of these problems are artifacts of my unfamiliarity with Vista,
but I've used Win2K and XP quite a bit.  Some things seemed very
logical.  For instance, instead of putting user settings in C:\Documents
and Settings\ Vista uses a simple c:\user, much more rational.  I think
there is a 256 character limit to path + filenames, so why use 22
characters just for the "/home" directory?

By contrast I am VERY impressed with Feisty, and this coming from
someone who has installed every Ubuntu release since Warty Warthog and
said 'meh?'  Feisty painlessly configured my buddy's proprietary
drivers, Intel wireless and the proprietary driver for the ATI X1300
video.  Likewise, it painlessly auto downloaded just about every
proprietary codec I pointed it at (the exception being libdvdcss, not
that I would ever install that, all hail the DMCA).   I was able to
listen to MP3s within seconds and watch SWF, FLV, AVI, MPG, MOV, there
might have been others.  Feisty boots more quickly than Vista, very fast
(of course this was a very fast machine, Core Duo).  WPA was no problem,
just plug in the key (I remember VI-ing the wpa_supplicant and screwing
around quite a bit to get Xubuntu Edgy to work with wireless just 6
months ago.  Beryl worked nicely.  Flash auto-downloaded the same way it
does in Windows when you first point your browser at a
flashplayer-infested page.  Almost everything really worked well (though
Kubuntu had a couple of bugs on another house mate's home made Athlon
1200+ home built system). 

Especially considering how underwhelmed I was with my server Etch
upgrade, I'd have a hard time pointing a beginner at any other distro
these days.  Opensuse is very nice, but the package management just
isn't as nice and getting the proprietary stuff to work is much more
problematic.  Mandriva 2007.1 is buggy, at least in the two upgrade
installs I've done, Metisse didn't work in either case, SU stopped
working until I issued some obscure command, flash drives are not
auto-mounting, regular users couldn't use 'locate' until I changed some
permissions. I'm sure a clean install would be a lot nicer.  We'll see
what Fedora 7 is like, but I'm not optimistic.  MEPIS & PCLINUXOS are
nice, but still back at 2.6.17 if you have newer hardware.
 
Nursing open sores since 2000,

Ed Biow