[conspire] Setting Up Partitions for LFS

[Mark Srebnik]

THANK YOU, David, for taking the time to provide a very helpful and clear
reply. I think I understand how this works much better now...

FWIW, yes, LFS, is LinuxFromScratch... Got the LFS book from Cheapbytes.com
last week. Read an interesting article about it in a recent Linux Pro
magazine (March 08, issue 88).

While it will probably be a fair amount of aggravation to get through it, I
think that I'll learn a lot by doing it....

Thanks,

Mark

on 3/24/08 7:20 PM, David Fox at dfox94085 at gmail.com wrote:

> 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