Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred
distros being discussed like they were matches for a personality test.
NovusBogus wrote:one of four camps[/url]: Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat, Slackware, and Arch,
NovusBogus wrote:one of four camps: Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat, Slackware, and Arch.
SonicSilicon wrote:Would like one that is geared toward setting up virtual machines.
SonicSilicon wrote:"Root file system" is a rather literal term. It took me over an hour of fruitless searching to suddenly realize that one of the partitions needed to have its mount point set as '/' -- i.e. root.
At least Linux Mint refuses to install to a FAT formatted partition, if not all distributions. I was a bit perplexed since Mint's built-in partition software can format FAT16 and FAT32.
Linux Mint is installed to the base drive, not the '/' root partition. I stared at a "grub-install /dev/sdXX failed" fatal error while I web-searched for help, only to just guess the proper reselection to make. Perhaps it's all those years of DOS-based systems that made me want to install to a partition rather than to the ... master boot record? (I'm not sure what part of the drive / file hierarchy it is.)
Swap disk space is used for hibernation and sleep power modes under Linux. Following advice from a video, I created a partition for it, but it seems Mint went and allocated some portion of the /Home partition for swap, regardless. I'm not sure if this is a change made between versions of Mint, or if I am simply unaware of a step to set the partition as the swap space.
SonicSilicon wrote:Linux Mint is installed to the base drive, not the '/' root partition. I stared at a "grub-install /dev/sdXX failed" fatal error while I web-searched for help
SonicSilicon wrote:My idea with formatting as FAT32 was to make it easier and faster to recover files in the case of an OS fault. (Typically I just pull a drive and hook it up on another system to do so.) It seems the typical response to that is simply to boot a clean copy of Linux from a USB flash drive, anyways, so I'm not sure if going back and making a separate FAT32 partition for work files would really be of any use.
SonicSilicon wrote:I did end up formatting as XFS for both '/' and '/home' partitions. It seems of have most of the benefits of ext4 while being more mature and possibly better for solid state drives. Mint didn't provide any control over block size for any formats, so hopefully it chose something reasonable, if not optimal.
SonicSilicon wrote:As for virtual machines, I may start a new forum thread for discussing that. Most of my interest at this point was to be sure I didn't inadvertently make it difficult to use one by selecting a distribution that handled them poorly or outright couldn't.
just brew it! wrote:O_O oh. I'm assuming by implication that an ext4 partition can be shrunk. I've only done a clean installation of the OS, so maybe I should redo /home as ext4?The one major disadvantage of XFS is that file systems cannot be shrunk once they have been created. So e.g. if you decide you want to image the disk to a smaller drive, or shrink a partition (or logical volume) to free up some space for something else, you're hosed.
just brew it! wrote:Fedora is good if you want bleeding edge. But you need to be willing to upgrade often since releases are not supported for very long. One major selling point of Fedora is that it is essentially the development branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so if you want/need to become familiar with Red Hat, Fedora can make sense.
The downside of going with a long-term support distro is that you will not have the latest versions of everything available in the distro's repository.
SonicSilicon wrote:just brew it! wrote:O_O oh. I'm assuming by implication that an ext4 partition can be shrunk. I've only done a clean installation of the OS, so maybe I should redo /home as ext4?The one major disadvantage of XFS is that file systems cannot be shrunk once they have been created. So e.g. if you decide you want to image the disk to a smaller drive, or shrink a partition (or logical volume) to free up some space for something else, you're hosed.
SonicSilicon wrote:just brew it! wrote:The one major disadvantage of XFS is that file systems cannot be shrunk once they have been created. So e.g. if you decide you want to image the disk to a smaller drive, or shrink a partition (or logical volume) to free up some space for something else, you're hosed.
O_O oh. I'm assuming by implication that an ext4 partition can be shrunk.
SonicSilicon wrote:I've only done a clean installation of the OS, so maybe I should redo /home as ext4?
Forge wrote:Things will be better once the motherboard OEMs figure out what they're doing.
Forge wrote:Both are sadly neglected and falling behind on other distros, though.
SonicSilicon wrote:O_O oh. I'm assuming by implication that an ext4 partition can be shrunk. I've only done a clean installation of the OS, so maybe I should redo /home as ext4?
Flatland_Spider wrote:Forge wrote:Both are sadly neglected and falling behind on other distros, though.
The Cinnamon devs only care about Mint, which is the problem with Cinnamon on other distros. Cinnamon on Fedora is pretty good, when I occasionally check it out.
I think Xfce superseded Mate. Everyone who was interested in a GTK+ 2 DE moved to Xfce. It can be made to look like Gnome 2, and UX is better then it ever was in Gnome.
Flatland_Spider wrote:ext4 partitions can be expanded online, but they can't be shrunk online. To shrink them, you need to unmount them and do as JBI suggested.
Flatland_Spider wrote:If you're going to be resizing partitions regularly, you should probably get familiar with LVM. LVM abstracts the filesystem from the underlying cylinders and sectors of the disk, which makes it easier to expand partitions since freeing space returns the space to the volume group.
Flatland_Spider wrote:Partitions can even span disks without having to use RAID, which is kind of neat.