Partitioning is a religious issue, but after more than 30 years supporting Unix & Unix-related systems, for my personal systems I put /home on one partition and everything else on a separate one. In these days of cheap terabyte disks, filling up is rarely an issue, and splitting /home off makes upgrades a doodle. Better still, I put /home on one disk and everything else on another, so when I upgrade, I just swap the system disk for a new (usually bigger) one, and if I need to retrieve anything from the old system, I can just plug the disk into a USB caddy.
Note that this is very different from what we do at work!
Huge.
On 13 Jan 2016, at 14:38, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 13/01/16 12:04, Chris Walker wrote:
Next question! I want to wipe everything from this drive and re-install with the latest release of Mageia 5. I also want to repartition the disc to avoid running out of space in the future. Is there a good guide somewhere that people would advise me to look at before doing that? I realise that I can just search for something but I want a guide that people think is the definitive guide and one that can be trusted for good advice.
Definitive guide? Ha! That's a good one! :-) I think you'll have to google and find various opinions! Good luck!
When I started, I just had everything in / I then have progressed to having / and /home. I think some people have /, /home, /var and /tmp, possibly more.
The reason for more partitions is, say, some rogue process or interenet attack filling up a log file (say) - if the log files are in /var and that's in a separate partition, then just that partition will fill up, and hopefully your system will fail gracefully, or not fail at all. However, you've got to balance that with the hassle of having multiple partitions.
For instance, you won't run into the "running out of space" problem if everything's stored under /, unless something fills up the entire disk. However, if this does happen, then you're in trouble,
I haven't gone down the "loads of partitions" route because I don't know how to apportion the disk space. For instance, if you have a /, /home, /var and /tmp, how much space should you allocate to each. What do you do if you get it wrong? This is especially hard for me as my setup also has RAID, which adds another level of complexity. I *think* that you can use something called LVM (I think) which (possibly) stands for Logical Volume Manager to create partions that can be easily resized. Otherwise, I don't know how you can resize your partitions without starting from scratch - perhaps it can be done, I don't know!
I don't know how magea works. However, there may be some mileage in this (which I think is the approach that Mint takes. Generate a list of installed packages (your package manager should be able to do this - (apt can I think, so can synaptic). Copy all the stuff you need, esp you /home directories and /etc for all the config files. Format and repartition, install, then run the list of packages that were installed through your package manager to ensure that they're reinstalled. Tweak the config files, restore /home.
That may work in theory, but I've not tried it. In Ubuntu for example, some packages get obsoleted and replaced by others. I don't know how the above approach would cope with that.
Good luck.
Steve
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