On Thu, 30 Oct 2014 19:30:54 +0100 Peter Nieman <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 30/10/14 17:48, [email protected] wrote: > > Hum... I think I always have seen the installer on "all in one > > partition (beginners)"? > > If you have selected this one, then, you should not have problems > > because of stuff not mounted. > > I guess you're right that there was an option to have everything in > one partition. Frankly, I don't remember what the installer menu in > Squeeze looked like. But anyway, what's the meaning of "all in one > partition (beginners)"? I wasn't a "beginner" at that time, so maybe > I thought that this option doesn't apply to me. ;-) > > A couple of years ago the advice given by most experts in newsgroups, > Linux books etc. was to *not* put everything in one partition, and > the installer definitely didn't recommend the opposite or even warn > against it. You learn as you go. The general rule of thumb is that there's not much to be gained on a workstation by using multiple partitions, though some people maintain that a swap partition is a little better than a swap file. I believe the 'all-in-one' installer option still uses a separate swap partition. On a server, running unattended most of the time, you really don't want a problem which generates large amounts of /var stuff to shut down the computer, so at least /var ought to be separate. There was once a theory that /usr would be read-only and contain user applications, possibly for multiple users on a networked system. In reality, a lot of system stuff seems to have spilled over into /usr, and even /bin and /sbin are supposed to be symlinked from it, so it needs to be available during boot. I wasn't able recently to find any instructions for mounting it during boot, so the easy way is to keep it in /. > And the partition sizes suggested by the installer were > wrong. > > Funny, that. Though not nearly as funny as with Windows, where the system partition is *always* underspecified, a full system partition means a reinstall, and log files are kept under the same top-level directory as library binaries... Yes, a few hundred megs were always OK for / if /usr and /var were separate, but now the modules for a single kernel are well over 100MB, and with Linux it's always a good idea to keep a spare kernel around. /lib, where the modules live, absolutely has to be available at boot. As to /home, it's useful to keep that separate if you expect to reinstall, but in any case, /home will be regularly backed up somewhere offline, won't it? -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
