As predicted, I did indeed take my Ubuntu book (Ubuntu 7.10 Unleashed)to bed with me, and forgot it when I left this afternoon, but I don’t care–it was almost useless for helping me plan how to set up and organize my system.
After yesterday’s debacle trying to figure out how to set up the file system, I spent some time researching file systems on line, and checked out the books available at Fry’s–not a great selection, and not current, but at least I knew what to check for this time.
Check the index for “file systems” “EXT3″ “ReiserFS” “XFS” “/TMP”. Any book without references to these items is simply not worth the trouble.
Of the books available at Fry’s, only one was useful: Stanfield and Smith’s Linux System Administration, 2nd Ed. This is fairly heavy going, being command-line oriented, and I wouldn’t recommend it for my Mom–but for anyone remotely computer savvy, it’s excellent. A little out of date, perhaps, but the basics haven’t changed.
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File systems:
After a lot of back-and-forth, I am indeed settling on EXT3, simply because it’s the current standard. The future of Reiser is in doubt, and the standard tools do not work with it. XFS is perhaps another good option, particularly for the /home directory, because it supports the advanced permissions system known as Access Control Lists.
Microsoft’s NTFS is apparently fairly well regarded as a file system, but only under Windows. The Linux drivers aren’t considered robust–because NTFS is an unpublished, proprietary specification, and the Linux drives were reverse-engineered.
My revised disk layout plan:
| Description | Name | Size | File System | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| boot directory | boot | 100 MB | ext3 | Should be within first 1024 cylinders for backwards compatibility |
| swap space | swap | 2GB(1.5 RAM size) | linux-swap | First cylinders are fastest;Max size 2GB |
| temporary system files | /tmp | 1 GB | ext3 | First cylinders are fastest |
| root directory | / | 20 GB | ext3 | System and program files go here. |
| home directory | /home | remaining free space | ext3 or xfs | User data |
I’ve seen suggestions for more detailed arrangements, but this seems to be a common compromise between the simplest swap+root arrangement and a more complex scheme with basic performance tweaks.
Slightly modified from mhelios’ partition scheme for Fedora.
Here’s Red Hat’s recommendations.
OK, enough quibbling. Back to actually setting the damn thing up.