[conspire] Setting Up Partitions for LFS

[David Fox]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Mark Srebnik <msrebnik at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
>  Just installed Debian on my little Fujitsu U810 mini-convertible tabletPC...
>
>  Dual booting with Win XPT and Debian now...

Cool!

>  However, the next step in my education is to try installing LFS....thought this would be a good way to get more aggravation and hopefully a better understanding of how linux distros work...

LFS - as far as I can tell, is "Linux from Scratch", I am not sure
that's what you intend to do - which would be to roll your own
distribution, which of necessity means compiling lots of stuff from
source.

You can compile any debian package from source - it's well designed to
do that, and so is Gentoo. Gentoo is more of a "build your set of
tools from source code" approach than is debian. Yet there are ways
(with the various build scripts and tools extant in debian) to do the
equivalent of "make world" and build everything. Just make sure to
have not run out of either disk space or warranty. :)


>  MarksU810:/home/archimark# df
>  Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
>  /dev/hda2               264443    104306    146482  42% /

Not a whole lot, but as you've gotten /usr and /tmp out of there,
perhaps it's sufficient.


>  The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 12161.
>  There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,

Not that big of a deal anymore with modern HDs and bioses.

>  Questions
>
>  1) Don't remember creating hda3, the extended partition. Do I need this one?
>  Seems like a lot of space for it...

It's the extended partition, all the partitions after /dev/hda3 exists
kind of "inside" /dev/hda3. The extended partition was there because
of a limitation in the number of primary partitions on an IDE volume.


>
>  2) The numbering sequence for my existing partitions (ex: hda9 is for /home) seems a bit jumbled...does that matter?

I would say not. These days, it's less important where to put things.
As long as other things are consistent (like your /etc/fstab matching
the partitions), then feel free to set things up the way you want.
Filesystems and the art of HD divvying is often an arena where if you
ask 10 users, 10 would tell you to do it differently, and the rest
would say "get rid of the Windows partition". Only joking of course.


>  If so, is there an easy way to renumber them to make more sense?

It's not worth the effort.

>
>  3) LFS instructions say to create a separate partition of about 5GB using ext2 filesystem.

The ext2 and ext3 filesystems are closely related. The only difference
is that (in ext3) there is a journal. So you need not create any other
partition. What you *might* want to do is somehow carve out an extra
partition to use as a "playground" second root (or "schroot"). For
example you could shrink the Windows partition some and have room for
that, or use space for something else. Setting up that partition for
LFS use mostly involves making the filesystem and doing a
"debootstrap" to create a minimal Debian on that partition.

See 8.6.35.1 Run a different Debian distribution with chroot at the URL

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tips.en.html

That's basically the same thing as the package debian-reference-en,
which basically is a very useful tome for Debian and other distros
such as Ubuntu.


>  Mark