Feuerbacher, Alan wrote: > Philippe Delavalade wrote: > >>> I read the man page for mke2fs and it's as clear as mud. And the >>> LFS book is completely unclear about exactly what is going on. >> >> The book suppose that you have some knowledge about linux and >> partitions :-) > > Well I do have *some* knowledge. It's just a matter of how much. :-) > > Seriously, I'm doing this in order to learn about all this stuff. > >> And the man about mke2fs is not so unclear, as I can remember. > > It is to me. I'll have to think a lot more about what you and Bruce > have told me, in terms of the mke2fs man page, and try to understand > what I'm missing. > >>> Are you saying that I have to run mke2fs for EACH of the devices >> /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and so forth? >> >> You'll have to do it for /dev/sda6 and for /dev/sda7 ; on sda2, I >> think you plane to install your home and that can wait ; for >> /dev/sda1 I think you can wait still the installation of the >> bootloader ; and /dev/sda5 is the swap, you'll see what to do with >> it at the end of your current section. > > My plan WAS to have /dev/sda1 as the /boot partition, and the rest as > whatever fdisk forces you to have. After some experimentation and > absorbing the material in the LFS book, I hit on this: > > /dev/sda1 /boot 500M > /dev/sda2 extended partition containing everything else > /dev/sda5 swap 32G (I have 16G of RAM) > /dev/sda6 /usr /dev/sda7 > /opt and so forth, following the LFS book.
/boot of 500M is a little large. I normally use 100M, but it probably doesn't matter. For a first build, do not use a separate /usr. Don't open yourself to potential problems until you understand more. You do not need 32G of swap. That 2x RAM rule is obsolete. http://askubuntu.com/questions/49109/i-have-16gb-ram-do-i-need-32gb-swap I suggest 2G swap. You can always add more later. If you are going to use a MSDOS partition table, why skip 2 parimary partitions? It really doesn't matter that much though. > Questions: > > Why would I NOT use mke2fs immediately to make filesystems on sda1, > sda2 and sda5? I want to know enough to really understand what is > going on sufficiently that I could teach it to my grandmother. :-) You can do it whenever you like. > Why would I wait until the installation of the bootloader? Wait for > what? I think the idea was to put off the decision until you actually needed to install something on the partition. It really doesn't matter though. >> Anyway, there is certainly a swap partition on your host system. > > Yes, but what does that have to do with the LFS system? All systems can share the same swap space. It actually makes some sense to have the swap partition on a different drive for marginally improved performance (but you really don't want to use swap anyway, just have it available if absolutely needed). > Ok, then: how does one get that information from the man page on > mke2fs? Man pages are not meant as a primary learning tool. They are supposed to be quick references for options, etc. "mke2fs is used to create an ext2, ext3, or ext4 filesystem, usually in a disk partition." What part do you not understand? > OK, but the LFS book clearly says that every partition will be ext3. In Section 3.3 it says "Instructions for creating other file systems can be found at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/filesystems.html."; ext3 is just used as the primary example. If you don't know why you want to deviate from the book, don't. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
