New Install Questions

[mmiller0521]

I am wondering if someone could answer some quetions for me about installing Gentoo. First of all is there a place where I can find the differences between the different filesystem types? And can someone reccomend to me how many partitions that I need? Ubuntu which I currently use just has the swap, and the root partitions. Whats best for a Gentoo system? Also whats the max I can use for swap, and what do you guys reccoment that I use?


Thanks!
Mitch

[Dlareh]

I am wondering if someone could answer some quetions for me about installing Gentoo. First of all is there a place where I can find the differences between the different filesystem types?

If you don't know the difference, just use reiserfs. It is the best all-around choice.

And can someone reccomend to me how many partitions that I need? Ubuntu which I currently use just has the swap, and the root partitions. Whats best for a Gentoo system?

A seperate 100mb ext2 /boot if you are going to use reiserfs for /

Beyond that it is entirely up to you. How big is the hard drive?

Also whats the max I can use for swap, and what do you guys reccoment that I use?

You should use 2 * the size of your system RAM.

[tomvollerthun]

If you don't know the difference, just use reiserfs. It is the best all-around choice.

I'm not so keen on flamewars, so simply imagine I had flamed you for that.
I advice ext3, since it is the best all-around choice ;)

It is usable as ext2, which was the default filesystem since ages
=> it's close to be as stable as software can be
=> You can use each and every recovery disc to repair it, since they all have ext2 support.

Baseline: It doesn't really matter so much which filesystem you have, and if ten posters answer your question, you'll get ten different answers and a full-featured flamewar.

You should use 2 * the size of your system RAM.

I have read, that this rule of thumb can be reduced to 1* size of ram, if you have >=1GB.
Other people say: 2 * the size of your system RAM, but not more than 512MB swap.

Again, this does not matter so very much. If you have plenty of space, creating a lot of swap doesn't hurt the system, so the (2 * the size of your system RAM)-rule won't damage anything.

cu, tom

[mmiller0521]

Is 2000 MB too big of a swap space? Will it hurt me?

[platojones]

Is 2000 MB too big of a swap space? Will it hurt me?

Not a bit (assuming you don't have a super tiny disk drive).

I had the same issue deciding about filesystems way back when...so I used both reiserfs and ext3 for 2 of my main mountpoints (/ and /usr respectively). Never had a single issue with either. They both have their advocates, however, both are advanced, high-performance journaling filesystems so you'll be fine either way you go. One thing to note about reiserfs, btw, the default stable reiserfs is reiserfs 3. reiserfs 4 is in beta, but I'd stay clear of that until it completely stabilizes. I think it's a good idea to stay away from beta filesystems unless you can afford to lose everything on that partition.

[nixnut]

Is 2000 MB too big of a swap space? Will it hurt me?

It won't hurt if you can miss that much harddisk space. You will probably only very rarely use that swap space though (assuming you have >512MB ram), so it is kinda wasteful.

[mmiller0521]

Is 2000 MB too big of a swap space? Will it hurt me?

It won't hurt if you can miss that much harddisk space. You will probably only very rarely use that swap space though (assuming you have >512MB ram), so it is kinda wasteful.

I only have 256MB of ram in the pc I'm installing Gentoo on, so I just thought using more swap space would be helpful , am I wrong thinking this?

[Dlareh]

I only have 256MB of ram in the pc I'm installing Gentoo on, so I just thought using more swap space would be helpful , am I wrong thinking this?

Yes. Your system will slow to a crawl before you ever reach the 2GB mark

If you are unwilling to take our advice and stick to 512mb, then at least only do 1GB.

[doro1211]

ext3 is a good all purpose filesystem. If the computer is very slow, you might want to use ext2, since it doesn't use journalling, so can be faster if the machine is slow. The difference is not noticeable for a fast machine.

If you will be dealing with lots and lots of small files, reiserfs is very fast. It suffers with larger files.

If you will be using lots of large files (like dvd/cd images and other media stuff), then use xfs or jfs. These do not perform as well on small files.

I suppose you could even use FAT32 if you wanted compatibility with windows, but I've never actually done it or heard of anyone using it for a linux system. As far as I know, it would work ok though.

ntfs is not an option, as linux cannot write well to ntfs. You can read windows partitions though if you add support to your kernel.

There is no single best filesystem, it just depends what you want to use it for.

If I had to pick one best filesystem in existence, I'd probably go with ufs, which is ultra stable and very fast. Very very resistant to corruption. However, linux doesn't support it. BSD uses it for one. ext3 is an excellent general purpose filesystem though.

[mmiller0521]

I only have 256MB of ram in the pc I'm installing Gentoo on, so I just thought using more swap space would be helpful , am I wrong thinking this?

Yes. Your system will slow to a crawl before you ever reach the 2GB mark

If you are unwilling to take our advice and stick to 512mb, then at least only do 1GB.

Are you saying that my system will actually suffer from having 2GB of swap space? Or are you just saying its pointless to use that much?

[Dlareh]

Are you saying that my system will actually suffer from having 2GB of swap space? Or are you just saying its pointless to use that much?

utterly pointless waste

[xeoph]

Are you saying that my system will actually suffer from having 2GB of swap space? Or are you just saying its pointless to use that much?

He/She is saying its pointless because for your computer to get to the 2GB mark of swap you would have 7 dumps already in swap, which will never happen and is utterly pointless.