Linux home and swap partitions?
 

hi,


I wish to know two things:

1- Can I install Linux distro without /home partition? Would it work well without home partition?

2- I have two hard disks. I wish to install one distro on one hard drive and the other one the other hard drive. Is it possible to create two swap partitions for these two distros instead of sharing one swap partition? Now if I install the two Linux distros on two different hard drives, can I create two swap partitions for these distros on the same hard drives where they are installed? Is it possible and would it work well?


Kindly inform.:)

1 - yes, no problem there at all, you might regret it though if you want to reinstall without losing your /home/user data.

2 - yes, no problem there at all either. I would suggest not caring though, you shouldn't want to use swap in the first place. You'd get better access time by using swap on the other disk, but again, not if you never use swap in the first place.

Thanks for your reply. For better clarification I would write my question 2 with more clarity. Suppose I am using one distro on disk 1 and the other on disk 2. On disk 1 I have created a swap partition for the distro on disk 1 and on disk two I have created a swap partition for for the distro on disk 2. Wouldn't the two swaps on my PC clash with each other? Or they would run just fine. You agree with you that there is no need to use swap but just out of curosity and gaining knowledge about Linux I am asking you this. Kindly inform. Best regards:)

they wouldn't clash at all. What do you even perceive clash to mean? You can happily use BOTH on BOTH distros if you want. It's a generic temporary file system.

I was thinking that either linux distro would tend to automount any swap partition it found. I'd have to double check. For them most part the swap is useless to a shutdown computer unless you hibernate. I get the feeling you have to force it to select a single swap. I could be very wrong on that.

The distro will mount what it's told to mount in fstab. There is no conflict unless you create one by putting both swap files in a single fstab and reference them as swap. To be honest I have no idea what the result would be but I doubt it would be good.

/home is simply the directory where user data is kept. If you aren't going to create any users other than /root you don't need /home (though it's not a good idea). You can assign any directory you like to be a user's "home" directory.

I wondered and I guess it should be done (unless you want to use hibernate). The last choice here might have to be double checked.
http://linux.about.com/od/ptn_howto/a/hwtptn10t02.htm
They suggest that all swap areas set at same priority would be like a raid. That would be a good thing if it did speed up swap.

I have used two swaps on two seperate disks with the same priority. It works fine.

I have never set up a system like that. Think it is time I start.