Gentoo!

[riven]

Originally posted by burns
Groovey, 512 it is then I'm tempted to use ReiserFS, it sounds like it's going to be faster than ext3?

yeah use ReiserFS but only for your root partition and dont forget to compile it into your kernel

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by riven
does a smaller boot partiiton give any speed advantage?

Nope, but it saves me a little space

Originally posted by robmiller
Right, I'm going in, wish me luck


I've got 1gb of RAM, and so was planning on going

32mb Boot
256mb swap
rest of the disk as /root


Sound ok?

Sounds good

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
I can't remember whether it was linux.org or gentoo.org, but I read earlier today that the swap partition should be equal to twice the physical memory.

Usually yes, but there gets a point where it'll just be a waste of space. With 1G of ram the swap shouldn't even be used. I used 512MB RAM and I've never seen it use the swap before. 512MB should be more that enough.

 

[burns]

Originally posted by riven
yeah use ReiserFS but only for your root partition and dont forget to compile it into your kernel

Cool, I'll use ext3 on the others then.

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by burns
Groovey, 512 it is then I'm tempted to use ReiserFS, it sounds like it's going to be faster than ext3?

It is faster, reiserfs is the fastest filesystem for small files like more of use have. XFS is faster if you move around very large files. I used Reiser4 for / and ext2 for /boot.

 

[riven]

Originally posted by Mpemba Effect
It is faster, reiserfs is the fastest filesystem for small files like more of use have. XFS is faster if you move around very large files. I used Reiser4 for / and ext2 for /boot.

snap

Cool, I'll use ext3 on the others then.

only for boot, dont forget /swap needs to be linux swap format

 

[Deadly Ferret]

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
I'm going with one (partition) for boot, one for root, one for home, and one for swap. I read that those are normal and in addition, a lot of people have one for usr, but I'm the only person who will be using the computer it's installed on so that seems redundant to me.

Does it matter which order on the disk I put those?

 

[riven]

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
Does it matter which order on the disk I put those?

4!

you should only need to use 3

/boot
/swap
/

the last is know as root, users are kept under /home/user

best order with a lot of ram is probably

/boot
/
/swap

with less ram maybe
/boot
/swap
/

mpemba?

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
Does it matter which order on the disk I put those?

If you're the only person using the machine I would say it's redundant it'll just just use up space partitioning. Obviously if you're installing a multiuser machine the something like /, /boot, /tmp, /var, /home would be good.

It doesn't matter what order you create these partitions but you'll have to keep in mind these when you install. You won't be able to follow the handbook word for word.

 

[burns]

Yay, do I get a medal for being the first to screw up? I've formated my swap partition as ext3, didn't see riven's post on time. I did mkswap on it, but swapon says the device is busy. Damn.

 

[Deadly Ferret]

Thanks. Well what I was thinking was, and this is on a 40GB disk in a machine which will be used by me alone, to keep myself occupied whilst burning or doing other CPU intensive things on my main machine, this:

Boot - 32MB
Swap - 512MB
Root - 4048MB
Home - rest of disk

Reason for seperate home being so that files are kept seperate, so hopefully if I ever mess up the installation, I could save the files before reinstalling.

Sound okay?

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by burns
Yay, do I get a medal for being the first to screw up? I've formated my swap partition as ext3, didn't see riven's post on time. I did mkswap on it, but swapon says the device is busy. Damn.

Try typing

swapoff /dev/hda2
mkswap /dev/hda2
swapon /dev/hda2

replace /dev/hda2 with whatever your swap parition is.

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
Thanks. Well what I was thinking was, and this is on a 40GB disk in a machine which will be used by me alone, to keep myself occupied whilst burning or doing other CPU intensive things on my main machine, this:

Boot - 32MB
Swap - 512MB
Root - 4048MB
Home - rest of disk

Reason for seperate home being so that files are kept seperate, so hopefully if I ever mess up the installation, I could save the files before reinstalling.

Sound okay?

Sounds like a good plan

 

[robmiller]

Righto, file system all set up, downloding stage tarball now Excuse the typing - laptop keyboards suck

 

[dav1d]

Originally posted by Deadly Ferret
Thanks. Well what I was thinking was, and this is on a 40GB disk in a machine which will be used by me alone, to keep myself occupied whilst burning or doing other CPU intensive things on my main machine, this:

Boot - 32MB
Swap - 512MB
Root - 4048MB
Home - rest of disk

Reason for seperate home being so that files are kept seperate, so hopefully if I ever mess up the installation, I could save the files before reinstalling.

Sound okay?

I would make your root partition at least 10GB - I am already using 5.3GB. It needs to be that big because you wont have a seperate /usr partition to store programs. I would only make it that small if you know that you are only going to install a few programs and a lightweight gui. If you want to install gnome or kde, make it bigger than that, especially if you install games (enemy territory or americas army are good linux games) or something like openoffice.

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by dav1d
I would make your root partition at least 10GB - I am already using 5.3GB. It needs to be that big because you wont have a seperate /usr partition to store programs. I would only make it that small if you know that you are only going to install a few programs and a lightweight gui. If you want to install gnome or kde, make it bigger than that, especially if you install games (enemy territory or americas army are good linux games) or something like openoffice.

Thats true, didn't spot that Otherwise partition off /usr. Thats the standard metohd for Freebsd who's philosophy is to use / as little as possible.

 

[robmiller]

Made my first boo-boo; I untarred the stage into /var somehow deleting what I extracted then untarring into /

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Originally posted by robmiller
Made my first boo-boo; I untarred the stage into /var somehow deleting what I extracted then untarring into /

How'd you manage that? /var is in the tarball, you don't need to create that directory unless you've decide to have a seperate partition for /var

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Two good read threads

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7386
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8642

 

[robmiller]

Hmmm, I'm getting lots of messages saying "No Such File or Directory" when I'm untarring, which I guess isn't supposed to happen? :/

 

[Mpemba Effect]

Well theres two / 's one / of the CD and /mnt/gentoo/ which will be the / of your gentoo distro. Once created the partitions and format them you need to mount them into /mnt/gentoo.

The stage tarball should be put into /mnt/gentoo and untared in there.

 

[burns]

Hmm, well I felt lazy so just rebooted, set my network up again and now have partitions for /boot, / and swap. The swap appears to be working ok as I didn't get any errors. Stage 1 is dowloading as we speak.