Migrating to Linux (Ubuntu?)
Some people have strong feelings about how many partitions a Linux OS should be installed in, 
so take my suggestions with a pinch of salt.
The days when you needed a swap partition twice as much as your ram are probably over for most hardware these days. With 128M of RAM you don't have enough to run a modern Linux OS with GUI - in those circumstances you would need a swap of 256M to just get you off the ground. These days the Linux kernel has matured, there's more GUI demands on resources, but on the other hand people are not counting the size of RAM in kB, but in GB! If you have a Linux OS installed keep an eye on your swap usage (run top or free in a console) and you'll see that hardly ever will you exceed say 350kB and more often than not you'll be pushed to use more than 50kB. In that sense, swap can be seen as a waste of hard disk space. Many installations that have available to them more than 1G of RAM can be performed without a swap partition.
However, as it has already been said, if you are running a laptop then you need a swap partition at least as large as your RAM to be able to suspend to disk. So, with RAM of 2G you'll need say 2.2G (leaving some margin for safety) to be able to suspend to disk.
With regards to /home being on a separate partition, I would recommend that just like My Documents or equivalent folders in a MSWindows machine, a new partition is created just for this purpose. Ditto for data, music, videos and what have you. If your OS is corrupted and it needs a reinstall, your home or data partitions can stay exactly where they are without having their content affected, or threatened with deletion.
Other directories, e.g. /opt, /var, /usr, etc. can also be on separate partitions and some of them would benefit being installed on a different disk/different IDE or SATA controller to allow parallel access/read/write. Yes, all this will increase speed and resilience on a server, but is it worth the hassle whatsoever for a desktop machine? Well, my humble view is that it is not. We're talking about milliseconds if not nanoseconds of difference here under particular OS conditions. The only system that I was able to notice a difference was an old PIII 600MHz box with 256M memory on it. So, these days I wouldn't bother. 10-15G for a modern Linux OS / partition is more than enough (I would say it is almost excessive - I've run Linux on less than 5G) and you could have everything in there except for /home, perhaps /opt (if you intend to install loads of games) and swap.
To see how much space your Linux is currently using up try df -h to check the partitions, and for the size of individual fs try du -s -h /*, or /home, /var, etc depending which directory you want to check. Then you'll know how much space your current install needs.
BTW, if you use LVM which I strongly recommend, then you can add space from additional hard disks on the fly and resize it at will.
PS. You'll find that reiserfs3 is live & kicking and its development continues. I definitely prefer it compared to other fs and have recovered from the most horrible crashes without loss of data - ever!
so take my suggestions with a pinch of salt.The days when you needed a swap partition twice as much as your ram are probably over for most hardware these days. With 128M of RAM you don't have enough to run a modern Linux OS with GUI - in those circumstances you would need a swap of 256M to just get you off the ground. These days the Linux kernel has matured, there's more GUI demands on resources, but on the other hand people are not counting the size of RAM in kB, but in GB! If you have a Linux OS installed keep an eye on your swap usage (run top or free in a console) and you'll see that hardly ever will you exceed say 350kB and more often than not you'll be pushed to use more than 50kB. In that sense, swap can be seen as a waste of hard disk space. Many installations that have available to them more than 1G of RAM can be performed without a swap partition.
However, as it has already been said, if you are running a laptop then you need a swap partition at least as large as your RAM to be able to suspend to disk. So, with RAM of 2G you'll need say 2.2G (leaving some margin for safety) to be able to suspend to disk.
With regards to /home being on a separate partition, I would recommend that just like My Documents or equivalent folders in a MSWindows machine, a new partition is created just for this purpose. Ditto for data, music, videos and what have you. If your OS is corrupted and it needs a reinstall, your home or data partitions can stay exactly where they are without having their content affected, or threatened with deletion.
Other directories, e.g. /opt, /var, /usr, etc. can also be on separate partitions and some of them would benefit being installed on a different disk/different IDE or SATA controller to allow parallel access/read/write. Yes, all this will increase speed and resilience on a server, but is it worth the hassle whatsoever for a desktop machine? Well, my humble view is that it is not. We're talking about milliseconds if not nanoseconds of difference here under particular OS conditions. The only system that I was able to notice a difference was an old PIII 600MHz box with 256M memory on it. So, these days I wouldn't bother. 10-15G for a modern Linux OS / partition is more than enough (I would say it is almost excessive - I've run Linux on less than 5G) and you could have everything in there except for /home, perhaps /opt (if you intend to install loads of games) and swap.
To see how much space your Linux is currently using up try df -h to check the partitions, and for the size of individual fs try du -s -h /*, or /home, /var, etc depending which directory you want to check. Then you'll know how much space your current install needs.
BTW, if you use LVM which I strongly recommend, then you can add space from additional hard disks on the fly and resize it at will.
PS. You'll find that reiserfs3 is live & kicking and its development continues. I definitely prefer it compared to other fs and have recovered from the most horrible crashes without loss of data - ever!
Hi Jeremy & Mick,
I have been giving the shutdown (lack) an airing on Ubuntu A. B. forum which you may have seen. Respondents have come up with a comprehensive and satisfactory fix that does not involve fiddling with the BIOS, to my relief! Anyway thanks for your interest and advice.
No doubt i will be back if more is needed.
colintivy
I have been giving the shutdown (lack) an airing on Ubuntu A. B. forum which you may have seen. Respondents have come up with a comprehensive and satisfactory fix that does not involve fiddling with the BIOS, to my relief! Anyway thanks for your interest and advice.
No doubt i will be back if more is needed.
colintivy
Quote from: MickKi PS. You'll find that reiserfs3 is live & kicking and its development continues. I definitely prefer it compared to other fs and have recovered from the most horrible crashes without loss of data - ever!
BTW
Quote Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 19, 1963) is an American computer programmer, the owner of Namesys, and the primary developer of the ReiserFS and Reiser4 computer filesystems. On April 28, 2008, he was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in 2006....
His Wikipedia entry is very interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser
Thanks for the suggestions, I really appreciate the the time you guys give us on this.
I have a good idea what to try now. However it it is Friday night, I have had a couple of beers and I did read on one of the forums that alcohol and Linux partioning do not mix well. So I will not do it tonight but will have a go at the weekend.
I have a good idea what to try now. However it it is Friday night, I have had a couple of beers and I did read on one of the forums that alcohol and Linux partioning do not mix well. So I will not do it tonight but will have a go at the weekend.
Did you try a live install CD of Ubuntu before going for a full install?
If it didn't boot into a (slow) but working system (including networking) then
you would know that you should expect problems.
I have installed Ubuntu on 3 machines - they all worked and have never needed a second install.
The PC I'm writing this on was upgraded from Dapper -> Edgy -> Feisty -> Gutsy -> Hardy
There were no failures.
The other 2 PC's were just Dapper -> Hardy upgrades.
All installs/upgrades only required one re-boot
If it didn't boot into a (slow) but working system (including networking) then
you would know that you should expect problems.
I have installed Ubuntu on 3 machines - they all worked and have never needed a second install.
The PC I'm writing this on was upgraded from Dapper -> Edgy -> Feisty -> Gutsy -> Hardy
There were no failures.
The other 2 PC's were just Dapper -> Hardy upgrades.
All installs/upgrades only required one re-boot
Quote from: waldron I did try with Ubuntu Gutsy. Spent days trying to get my USB wifi card working (router is too far away for ethernet) and eventually managed it with help from people on here. I never did get my eSata drive working. My upgrade to Hardy failed during the installation and left me with an unbootable system, so I gave up.
Perhaps the current version of Ubuntu is not suitable for your hardware. Like axisofevil suggests, I would also strongly recommend to try another LiveCD distribution (CentOS, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, etc) to see which one recognises your hardware with minimum configuration.
Upgrades should be seamless on a Linux distro these days. Despite that, just like you, I managed to trash a Ubuntu server a couple of years ago - never liked the darn thing anyway. Then I decided to read the upgrade guide which Ubuntu kindly provided (after a number of people complained that they had borked their systems). The upgrade path was rather <aheam> customised pertinent to the Ubuntu peculiarities, compared to your vanilla Debian based Linux distro. Well, since then I always read the instructions first . . .
