so I think I'm going to move from Debian to Slackware...

bgeddy · 06-07-2010, 11:35 AM

Quote:

oh and I forgot: Happy Birthday dive

All the Best, dive. Have a good one

.

dive · 06-07-2010, 11:38 AM

Thanks all

mcnalu · 06-07-2010, 04:11 PM

@OP as well getting a super-reliable distro, you also will get lots of birthday wishes if you hang out in this friendly and very helpful forum for long enough

Happy Birthday Dive!

brianL · 06-07-2010, 06:23 PM

Better late than never: Happy Birthday, Dive!

steviebob · 06-07-2010, 10:27 PM

Well, everyone else answered most of the questions, but unless I skipped something and didn't see it, I have an answer for your last question. Slackware is perpetually stable.

rkrishna · 06-08-2010, 12:02 PM

belated happy birthday dive.

back to main post.
Edit-

Code:

:%/s/ u / you /g

partition
1. regarding the partition
i wil only give max 20-30 Gb for /
and if needed you can create few more partitions to try various linux. that is what i do. you can install ubuntu and suse along with it. i suggest you to try suse so that you can look at various configuration files if needed.
even you can try windo$ too

i always create one primary and all remaining space as extended(which itself is primary) partition so that you can create as many no of partitions.
the additional partitions are called logical drives and swap can also be a logical partition.
if you are downloading source, (olden days we used to use checkinstall and slackpkg) now i suggest you to try slackbuilds.(src2pkg, sbopkg etc)
there are few repos available for slackware. a simple search in our forum will give u the full list.
there are many precompiled slackware packages available, for eg. http://www.linuxpackages.net/ is one of them and we have http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/

for most of the standard softwares we have slackware packages.

before compiling from source please check whether there is any slackbuilds available.
forget about dependency hell, this is one thing i like in slackware
yes slackware provides up-to-date stable versions of various softwares
Quote:

Overall, what does Slackware offer to it's users that Debian and Mandriva don't? Does it have any big disadvantages?

this is the best question.

slackware teach you, how linux works. i know that debian alters everything, you only learn debian when u use it, and when you try another flavor of linux you are confused, there is no apt-get and we dont know where the configuration files are?. this never happens with slack.

all and all you will get a nice bunch of friends and a great community here

i think, once u install slackware, you will get the answers to all the questions automatically. please go through the following links
http://www.slackbook.org/
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Slackware-Links

welcome to LQ slackware forum

regards rkrishna

onebuck · 06-08-2010, 02:42 PM

Hi,

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkrishna

<snip>

i always create one primary and all remaining space as extended(which itself is primary) partition so that you can create as many no of partitions.
the additional partitions are called logical drives and swap can also be a logical partition.

<snip>

This statement is a little misleading. For hdd subsystems the number of primary partitions allowed are 4. Logical partition(s) which are secondary partitions contained within the contiguous space of the extended partition. This extended partition will take the place of a primary position and is treated as such. You can have no more than one extended partition on a subsystem. Within the extended partition you can then have several logical partitions (treated as secondary partitions) within the assigned contiguous allocated space for the extended partition container.

Sure there are ways to hide the partitions but that does require more work. A lot easier to use separate hdd subsystems since the cost is cheap than it would be for the time to hide things.

Quote:

excerpt from 'Linux Partition HOWTO';

3. Partition Types

3.1. Partition Types

A partition is labeled to host a certain kind of file system (not to be confused with a volume label (see Section 6)). Such a file system could be the linux standard ext2 file system or linux swap space, or even foreign file systems like (Microsoft) NTFS or (Sun) UFS. There is a numerical code associated with each partition type. For example, the code for ext2 is 0x83 and linux swap is 0x82. To see a list of partition types and their codes, execute /sbin/sfdisk -T

3.2. Foreign Partition Types

The partition type codes have been arbitrarily chosen (you can't figure out what they should be) and they are particular to a given operating system. Therefore, it is theoretically possible that if you use two operating systems with the same hard drive, the same code might be used to designate two different partition types. OS/2 marks its partitions with a 0x07 type and so does Windows NT's NTFS. MS-DOS allocates several type codes for its various flavors of FAT file systems: 0x01, 0x04 and 0x06 are known. DR-DOS used 0x81 to indicate protected FAT partitions, creating a type clash with Linux/Minix at that time, but neither Linux/Minix nor DR-DOS are widely used any more.
OS/2 marks its partitions with a 0x07 type and so does Windows NT's NTFS. MS-DOS allocates several type codes for its various flavors of FAT file systems: 0x01, 0x04 and 0x06 are known. DR-DOS used 0x81 to indicate protected FAT partitions, creating a type clash with Linux/Minix at that time, but neither Linux/Minix nor DR-DOS are widely used any more.

3.3. Primary Partitions

The number of partitions on an Intel-based system was limited from the very beginning: The original partition table was installed as part of the boot sector and held space for only four partition entries. These partitions are now called primary partitions.

3.4. Logical Partitions

One primary partition of a hard drive may be subpartitioned. These are logical partitions. This effectively allows us to skirt the historical four partition limitation.
The primary partition used to house the logical partitions is called an extended partition and it has its own file system type (0x05). Unlike primary partitions, logical partitions must be contiguous. Each logical partition contains a pointer to the next logical partition, which implies that the number of logical partitions is unlimited. However, linux imposes limits on the total number of any type of partition on a drive, so this effectively limits the number of logical partitions. This is at most 15 partitions total on an SCSI disk and 63 total on an IDE disk.

3.5. Swap Partitions

Every process running on your computer is allocated a number of blocks of RAM. These blocks are called pages. The set of in-memory pages which will be referenced by the processor in the very near future is called a "working set." Linux tries to predict these memory accesses (assuming that recently used pages will be used again in the near future) and keeps these pages in RAM if possible.
If you have too many processes running on a machine, the kernel will try to free up RAM by writing pages to disk. This is what swap space is for. It effectively increases the amount of memory you have available. However, disk I/O is about a hundred times slower than reading from and writing to RAM. Consider this emergency memory and not extra memory.
If memory becomes so scarce that the kernel pages out from the working set of one process in order to page in for another, the machine is said to be thrashing. Some readers might have inadvertenly experienced this: the hard drive is grinding away like crazy, but the computer is slow to the point of being unusable. Swap space is something you need to have, but it is no substitute for sufficient RAM. See the discussion in Section 4.4 for tips on determining the size of swap space you need.

Richard Cranium · 06-08-2010, 03:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by onebuck

This statement is a little misleading. For hdd subsystems the number of primary partitions allowed are 4. Logical partition(s) which are secondary partitions contained within the contiguous space of the extended partition. This extended partition will take the place of a primary position and is treated as such. You can have no more than one extended partition on a subsystem. Within the extended partition you can then have several logical partitions (treated as secondary partitions) within the assigned contiguous allocated space for the extended partition container.

Sure there are ways to hide the partitions but that does require more work. A lot easier to use separate hdd subsystems since the cost is cheap than it would be for the time to hide things.

Or just run lvm (which won't help with Windows partitions) which is even cheaper than new hard drives.

onebuck · 06-08-2010, 04:28 PM

Hi,

I don't use nor care for 'lvm'.

But each to his/her own.

Cultist · 06-08-2010, 04:34 PM

so far I like the answers. But for those of you who say not to use so much space in /, what should I do with the remainder? I've already got a 320 gb /home going, not really sure what to use the other 250~ whatever gb on, other than more / space.

edit: oh and happy belated birthday, Dive :P

revoemag · 06-08-2010, 04:36 PM

Why do people act like fdisk is so complicated? I don't really see any need to download something else to partition.
http://slackbook.org/html/book.html#...N-PARTITIONING

And if you decide to use slaptget and want it with a GUI gslapt is an option. Just make sure you change from the slack ftp and use a faster mirror for it.
http://software.jaos.org/

damgar · 06-08-2010, 04:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cultist

so far I like the answers. But for those of you who say not to use so much space in /, what should I do with the remainder? I've already got a 320 gb /home going, not really sure what to use the other 250~ whatever gb on, other than more / space.

I personally like to keep some unallocated space for playing with later on, and a large data partition, as well as another large partition that I use for a sort of backup that I only mount manually so if something dumb happens (read "if I screw things up") My data has a chance of surviving the event. That's just me and I happen to have WAY more disk space than I will probably ever need.

Didier Spaier · 06-08-2010, 04:45 PM

Beside swap I have only one partition for / on my laptop where I put everything. This is good enough for a desktop (or laptop, in my case) IMHO. I do not have a dedicated partition for /home anymore and do not miss it.

SpelledJ · 06-08-2010, 08:15 PM

I meant to offer some suggestions yesterday but didn't get to it.

I agree with the others that / shouldn't be more than 10-20GB. I've had machines running for 2-4 years that only have about 5-6GB in all the other partitions besides /home. That's with full Slackware installs and a fair amount of additional software added.

You could put swap and / on drive 'a', and use all of drive 'b' for /home. Only partition drive 'a' for the 2GB swap and the 10-20GB root; leave the rest unpartitioned. Later on if you want more space for /home, you can add another partition on drive a and mount it under /home. It could be something like /home/extra, and you can set the permissions to either be an extension of your main user, or community storage if you have other users in the house.

Another thought is to put both drives in a RAID1 configuration, which is what I tend to do these days. I had a rash of hard disk failures a couple of years ago and now don't use single drives any more. In RAID1, the drives are mirrors of each other, so you'd only have 320GB of storage. You could have 2GB swap, 10GB /, and the rest /home (probably around 290GB formatted). Depends on your comfort level and how much storage you need. If drive 'a' was going to be mostly empty anyway then you'd gain a little bit of protection from data loss, and not give up much space. Keep in mind that RAID1 isn't a substitute for backups though - a motherboard or drive controller failure could still result in corruption to every drive attached at once. There is an excellent howto in the READMEs of the Slackware install disk if you're interested. Would make for a good learning experience and isn't too difficult a project. If you need 640GB of space (like ripping DVDs or storing HD video or something) I wouldn't bother.

rkrishna · 06-08-2010, 08:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cultist

so far I like the answers. But for those of you who say not to use so much space in /, what should I do with the remainder? I've already got a 320 gb /home going, not really sure what to use the other 250~ whatever gb on, other than more / space.

edit: oh and happy belated birthday, Dive :P

i think it is better to have a /data partition to store your movies and songs(is the main thing which consume space). all your personal setting will be there in home dir. so when u upgrade an OS and still use the same /home, we may have problems, for eg. u can see the desktop in a messed up state(we may use new versions of kde/gnome). so it is advisable to format the home after few updates.
suppose you have more than one operating system, then for sharing resources, it is better to have a separate partition for data

i suggest not to use more than 30gb for /. we all are human, we make mistakes, re installation is needed sometimes(especially in the initial stages of updating slack)

create some partitions of 10gbs and try various linuxs. and use slack as primary OS, install grub and chainload the entries. you will still have your fav mandriva and deb.