Partitions for Linux - does size matter?

karavite

karavite

Registered
Hi, I am installing Suse Linux 7.3 on my G4 450. I have it running now, but I'm not sure a single/lonely 10 GB root parition is the best way to go! Suse tech support says it isn't a problem, but their installer has some dialog that says it is a problem. Who can I trust? (macosx.com of course)

Any way, here is the question - I can dedicate 10 GB to Linux on my second drive. I saw another post where billbaloney said he set up his partitions as:

/
swap (I got this one on my own)
/var
/tmp
/usr
/home

I think I like this, but I'm not sure how much space to give to each! This is what I need to know.

Again, 10 GB total for a single user set up and I'll be spending most of my time installing various packages (that don't yet run on XDarwin), fooling around with Perl and just learning about Linux. So - heavy on the apps for one user. Thanks in advance!
 
your going to have to have a separate partition for /swap.

You might want just use the 2 partitions (/ and /swap) and do an install
and see how much it loads into the various mount points. Usually,
/ is pretty small and most of it is under /usr.

Then, if you want, reinstall w/ as many partitions as you want.

That said, OSX/Darwin is a perfectly good Unix to learn or play w/.
Not sure what you want to get out of the "Linux" thing.
 
That said, OSX/Darwin is a perfectly good Unix to learn or play w/.
Not sure what you want to get out of the "Linux thing"
Click to expand...

I'm not sure either, but it is interesting to see a completely different OS on my Mac. For some reason Suse Linux says my video card (stock card in a G4 450 AGP) does not support XFree v4 and with v3 the graphics performance is really sluggish. Am I wrong or is XDarwin perfectly happy with v4? Over all, XDarwin full-screen is much prettier and less troublesome (so far) than my Linux install, but I'm mainly interested in playing with all the applications and window mangers (KDE for example) that do not yet run on XDarwin. I'm hoping to learn to compile programs from source code for XDarwin, but I have a problem with delayed gratification!

My first impression of Linux is that "they" seem to go out of there way to make things confusing and difficult to understand. Take key bindings for example - few are intuitive and there is nothing approaching a standard across applications. For God's sake, do I really need to learn new keybindings for cut, copy and paste and/or designate my own preferred key bindings for every application, editor, desktop environment... ? Life is short and there are plenty of more worthwhile and productive things for people to do!

There was an article in the NYT that discussed the Linux usability issue - they may have tons of free and stable apps, but unless they clean up on usability, it will continue to be an semi-elitist, geek domain. I understand the history of things that has resulted in a lot of these issues, and that some people enjoy having an unaccessible-to-the-masses OS, but it only hurts them in the end. Kudos to Apple for finally creating something that bridges both worlds.

Any way, thanks for your ideas - I'll try it out.
 
You should make sure that your version of XFree86 is the most recent version and you don't need any special flags whenever you start XWindows. Also, could it be that the WindowManager you are using is giving you these errors? If you still get the errors just reinstall the latest version of XFree86 and if that doesn't work then you should email them and let them now about this. I never had problems running XWindows on my Dual-USB iBook or G4/400 with a ATI Rage 128 in it.

Justin
 
Sorry Justin - I wasn't clear. XDarwin *is* using XFree v4, but Suse Linux booting on the same machine (!!!) says I can only use v3 becuase of my video card - which happens to be the stock ATI Rage 128 AGP... G4 450 video card.

Another bizzare thing - I have dual monitors but Suse all runs on my second monitor! Weird. I had Suse 6.4 on this machine a year ago and it ran on my main monitor. Oh well.
 
I'd recommend that you only keep /, swap, and /tmp as separate partitions. The tradition of having things like /usr on a separate partition is an anachronistic holdover from the days when disks were very small.

The only reason to have /tmp be separate is to be able to apply different mount flags to it, which confounds many simple security exploits. If you mount /tmp with the nosuid, nodev, and noexec flags, all respectable uses should proceed normally, but some compromise attempts will be foiled.
 
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