HD partitions?

[Jerry Feldman]

On Thursday 16 June 2005 9:16 am, Puissante wrote:
> I would strongly suggest using Grub over Lilo -- mostly for religious
> reasons. Actually, I've always used Grub and have never touched Lilo
> except maybe once in the past, and I like being able to reconfigure Grub
> settings during the boot process. You can change kernel paramenters, for
> instance, which sometimes can be a lifesaver. Not sure what Lilo has to
> offer in this regard.
I would suggest Grub for technical reasons. 
First, you can update your kernel without having to run any kind of grub 
configurator. With Lilo, any time you update the kernel, either by building 
a custom kernel or by receiving an update from the OS vendor (SuSE, Red 
Hat, Fedora, ...), you would need to run lilo. 

I think that if you are going to be using the system as a multi-user system, 
then I would go with Kevin's suggestion. But even as a home user, using a 
single partition is a bad idea.  I normally use 3 partitions:
1. / - Root - this is relatively stable. Contains most the programs you use 
as well as system config files.
2. /home - User directories are here. By making this separate, if you 
decided to update your OS, you don't need to blow this away. 
3. /usr/local - This is a case where if you install some packages from 
source or some non-distro RPMs, they will persist across OS installs.
---
4 /var - kevin posted some good reasons for this. Not only log files, but 
also your email and printer spools go here as well as some temp space.
5. /boot - I rarely configure a separate /boot. The separation of the /boot 
used to be important when large disk support was lacking in the BIOS. 

Linux now contains the capability to resize partitions using GNU parted, 
SuSE YaST, QTParted, and other graphical front ends. 

Another way you can maintain flexibility is to use LVM. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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