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Which filesystem should I use?

post #1 of 14
4/23/05 at 3:19pm
Thread Starter 
Hello all,

I am preparing to install Gentoo on my Asus, but I don't know what filesystems to use on each of my paritions (or mounts?). And what paritions (or mounts?) should I have? I am currently going to use / and /boot and /proc I think. Is this right? Would this work well?

Thanks for the help!
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post #2 of 14
4/23/05 at 3:44pm
reiserfs
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post #3 of 14
4/23/05 at 3:49pm
Thread Starter 
For all the directoris (/ /boot /proc)?
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post #4 of 14
4/23/05 at 4:53pm
Use ext2 for boot, just to keep things easier.
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post #5 of 14
4/23/05 at 5:00pm
Thread Starter 
So ReiserFS for / and /proc and ext2 for /boot. What are / and /proc and /boot 's called? Mounts? Partitions? Directories?

And are these the only ones that should be separated?
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post #6 of 14
4/23/05 at 5:11pm
You really don't need to seperate the partitions. One main partition of reiserfs will be fine. There is no need to split up '/' '/boot' '/proc' etc etc. If you just do '/' as reiserfs it will be fine. If you really want to though just make seperate partitions of /boot at a size of about 50 megs or less and /home at however big you want. Other then that there is no need to seperate the partitions. Oh but if you don't have alot of ram don't forget to make a swap parition.
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post #7 of 14
4/23/05 at 5:11pm
/ and /boot are mountpoints. partitions are /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 etc (the 1 being the number of the partition...)

/proc is a virtual interface with the kernel. It doesnt take up space on the harddrive or anything. The only things you should need are /boot (32 - 100 megs or so - depending on the complexity of your kernel and how often you rebuild - or use a variety of kernels) a swap partition - that should take up about 2x your current ram on the HD. and the root drive or /

heres what i use most of the time:

/dev/hda1 = /boot (32M - and use ext2 for this one)
/dev/hda2 = swap (512M assuming your using a system with 256M ram)
/dev/hda3 = / (the rest of the drive. reisersfs is fine. i use ext3 most of the time)

you can have a seperate partition for the /usr section or /home, but thats only if you know exactly how much space you may need for the different sections.

i might have rambled a bit there, but i hope it helped.

*EDIT* - yeah, the boot partition isnt really required or anything - just keeps the kernel isolated.
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post #8 of 14
4/23/05 at 5:49pm
Thread Starter 
Great! Thanks for the help!

I think my setup will be as follows:

/dev/hda1 = Windows XP (30GB with NTFS)
/dev/hda2 = /boot (32MB with ext2)
/dev/hda3 = swap (1024MB)
/dev/hda4 = / (29GB with ReiserFS)

Does that look like it would work?
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post #9 of 14
4/23/05 at 7:56pm
That sounds fine - but out of curiosity, what distribution are you using?
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post #10 of 14
4/23/05 at 8:16pm
Guys, I should note that although a separate boot mountpoint is not required, I STRONGLY recommend it. I started out directly with Gentoo and was really surprised when I discovered that most other distros don't separate /boot. The reason you want to separate it is because you want to keep it unmounted or read-only most of the time - this way, if your machine crashes, you know for sure that the data in /boot is safe. In addition, you run no risk of corrupting the boot data yourself with a stupid mistake. On the other hand, if /boot is not a separate mountpoint, you run the risk of corrupting your kernel and without a clean kernel, your machine is not going to boot (you'll need to do some recovery).
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post #11 of 14
4/23/05 at 8:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by B Nietsnie
Great! Thanks for the help!

I think my setup will be as follows:

/dev/hda1 = Windows XP (30GB with NTFS)
/dev/hda2 = /boot (32MB with ext2)
/dev/hda3 = swap (1024MB)
/dev/hda4 = / (29GB with ReiserFS)

Does that look like it would work?
Sounds fine, but such an amount of swap is quite useless. I know, I know, you should have at least the amount of your RAM. However, you will quickly see that it is quite pointless - your machine will hardly ever touch it, especially with 1GB of RAM.

Mikhail
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post #12 of 14
4/23/05 at 11:12pm
/boot is similar to vi vs emacs. I generally run it as a seperate partition that while I'm trying out different kernels I have it auto mount. However when I get a kernel that I'm happy with and going to stick with as a default. I then vi fstab and the no auto. Mikhail id dead on with his reasons. I've munged up my kernel on occasion due to leaving it writeable. As to swap, even with my meager 512, I've only seen mine get into swap on a couple of occasions. It generally hovers around 500M physical cached. It's up to you but swap isn't entirely necesary. In the end it's your system and your decision. I would also reccomend that you consider making /home a partition oit's own. That way if you do endup formatting / you don't loose personal data.
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post #13 of 14
4/24/05 at 10:42am
Exactly @ 512MB RAM for swap. Thats what I have as well and we are both running Gentoo (if any distro is computationally expensive to maintain, Gentoo is certainly one of them)!

In regards to /home, I would definitely recommend having a separate mountpoint if you have multiple drives - if the drive with the system data crashes, you at least have your /home intact. However, when you only have a single drive, my personal opinion is that there is not much of a point in keeping /home separate. The reason is, if you keep it separate, you must impose an initial size limit on the block of data; if its a personal machine, there is probably not much point in restricting yourself like that (may as well use all the drive space you can, right?). It would certainly be convenient to have /home separately for the sake of easy/safe system rebuilds, but then again I haven't reinstalled my Gentoo since Dec '04 (it was Gentoo 1.4 back then, but the base layout updates have been smooth so I'm running the latest and greatest 2005.0 base).
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post #14 of 14
4/24/05 at 2:46pm
Yeah as it has been made clear to you... i recommedn resierfs as well here my /etc/mtab... on my desktop but for all intents and purposes it doesnt matter

/dev/sda3 / reiserfs rw,noatime 0 0
none /dev devfs rw 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 rw,noatime 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows/c ntfs ro 0 0
192.168.0.102:/home/server/media /mnt/media nfs rw,addr=192.168.0.102 0 0

I have SATA hence the sda vs. hda and i have windows on a seperate hd. But i hope this give you a general idea. /dev/sda1 is boot /dev/sda2 is swap /dev/sda3 is root (/)
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