Stremik Posted November 23, 2002 Share Posted November 23, 2002 Ok. I'm ready to install RH7.3 but before I do that I want to find out which file system should I compile harddrive with? Ext2? Ext3? What are the difference between them? What are the advantages and disadvantages do they have in comparison to one another? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MG Posted November 23, 2002 Share Posted November 23, 2002 I think you'd better go for ext3. I can't really name pros or cons of it, but it's generally better to go for the latest. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miguel m Posted November 23, 2002 Share Posted November 23, 2002 Not to bog here with technical stuff. In short with ext3 you'll save yourself long times of autochecking filesystems if your computer shuts down incorrectly. It's also less prone to corruption than ext2 when the system crashes or loses power. A very good option would be Reiserfs but i don't think the stock redhat kernels support it yet. Thus it's not trivial to install redhat onto one of those, snif snif. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stremik Posted November 26, 2002 Author Share Posted November 26, 2002 What about Swap Partition? What is it for? Should I concider it as an option? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miguel m Posted November 26, 2002 Share Posted November 26, 2002 If you have 1 or 2 Gigs of ram you could recompile the kernel not to use swapping at all. Linux would force everything to stay in RAM and therefore you could live without that partition. Otherwise you'll need it. Size it as you would for a windows paging file. I think for normal use, real-RAM+Swap= 1.5 or 2 gigs does well. btw, don't be fooled if you see all your ram being used, Linux is very agressive at caching and will keep lots of stuff there for the sake of speed. But at the same time it does well at freeing it when you need it. Is't it beautiful? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stremik Posted November 26, 2002 Author Share Posted November 26, 2002 OK. So. I have dedicated 20GB of hrddrive to Linux and formatted it as a primary partition in Ext3. I only got 512 MB of RAM so Swap is a nessecity. I got three primary partitions. One for Windows. 20 GB. Another for Linux. 20 GB. The third one is an extended partition and it takes up what's left of 80 GB. Where should I put the Swap? Should I use 2 GB from Linux'es partition or I can grab this space from the Extended one? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mcronin Posted November 26, 2002 Share Posted November 26, 2002 You can break that up even more. I don't know how much of RH you intend to install, but if you install everything it's a bit less than 2.5 gigs. You'll install Houdini and a couple other miscellaneous apps, you won't need more than 5 gigs certainly. Here's what I do on a 60 gig drive. Main Linux partition is 5 gigs, Linux swap is 2 gigs, Win 2K is 8 gigs and the rest (45 gigs) is a giant Fat 32 partition that my work files go on. You can mount this Fat 32 partition in Linux so you have access to it from both Linux and Windows. Doing it this way, if one of your installations goes bad you can always just reinstall it, without worrying about whether your work is safe. I also always put the Linux boot loader on floppy rather than the HDD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mcronin Posted November 26, 2002 Share Posted November 26, 2002 Just a quick tip, since you seem to be new to Linux. You are going to have to edit a lot of configuration files (it's really not that bad) but to save yourself a headache, once you have a good configuration working, back up the files to a floppy, CD, or yor work partition or something. At some point you may make a change that screws things up or need to reinstall Linux, and you'll be glad you don't have to edit all those files again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stremik Posted November 27, 2002 Author Share Posted November 27, 2002 Great! Thank you. One more question tho. How can I make (mount) my third, Extended(it's in NTFS), partition so I can access it from Linux? I'm using Partition Magic and right now I can see the Linux partition from withing Partition magic only. Not from Windows itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Linux!!! Hot diggity!!! No more stupid registry and shared DLLs!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mcronin Posted November 27, 2002 Share Posted November 27, 2002 I'm not sure if the default RH installation supports NTFS, if it doesn't you'll either have to recmpile the kernel and enable NTFS support or use Partition Magic to convert it to FAT32. Converting to FAT is obviously the easier of those two options. Partition Magic will let you change the file system without formatting and destroying data present on the disk. We can check real quick to see if your install supports NTFS though, keep reading. If you take a look at the directory tree in Linux, you'll find a directory labled 'mnt'. Inside the mnt directory are probably some other directories such as 'cdrom' and 'floppy' these are actual mount points for these devices. If you browse the CDROM directory you'll see the contents of your CDROM. You need to make mount points for the Windows partition (if you want access in Linux) and the also the work partition. So, open up a console and type... mkdir /mnt/windows and mkdir /mnt/work This creates two new directories (mount points) in the mnt folder. Now try mounting your "work" partition. Type this at the console. mount /dev/hdaX /mnt/work -t ntfs The X is to be replaced by the partition number on your HD (it'll probably be 4 or 5). What the code means: mount - you're telling Linux to mount a device /dev/hda - you want to mount a partittion from harddisk 1(a) X - replaced by the partition number /mnt/work - the mount point (directory) you want to mount it to -t ntfs - the type of file system (for FAT 32 use -t vfat) Hopefully you should now be able to browse the work directory and see whatever is on that partition. You can do the same thing for your Windows partition using the /mnt/windows mount point. Beyond that you can put an entry into your fstab file so the partitions automount every time you start Linux, and you can also set permissions in fstab making the Windows partition read only or whatever. For more info on fstab look here. http://www.frankenlinux.com/intro/fstab.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevenong Posted November 27, 2002 Share Posted November 27, 2002 I would also suggest going to LinuxNewbie for all your answers. Cheers! steven Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stremik Posted November 27, 2002 Author Share Posted November 27, 2002 Thanks everybody for your help! Mcroinin I will give it a try in one or two days. I haven't installed RH yet because I couldn't download it over the net with my 56K connection but I asqued my friend who has cable connection to do it for me. On top of that, Thanksgiving is almost here and I'm preatty preoccupied with all the cooking and stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LEO-oo- Posted November 29, 2002 Share Posted November 29, 2002 @Stremik: Go and get CDs with the complete RH-distro. It is easier ;-) I recommend ext3 or ReiserFS (I'm not sure about RH, but Suse have it). We run a file-server with ReiserFS and it works perfect (now for almost 3 years). LEO Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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