Re: D-I impressions
Package: partman
On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 12:07:16AM -0500, Ryan Underwood wrote:
>
> - In the partitioning menu, I finished partitioning and went to "Go
> Back" to go back to the main menu. Unfortunately, I didn't know this
> was equivalent to a "Cancel" action, and lost my changes after a
> warning. Perhaps there should be a confirmation to "Go Back" as there
> would be a confirmation to cancelling anything in a GUI which the user
> has already placed input to.
I think this is fixed already.
> - This box is to be a dedicated server with no user accounts, but Multi
> User was the only option that made sensible partition defaults
> (because I like separate partitions to avoid fragmentation, limit
> spread of corruption in case of a problem, etc). Something seems
> incongruent about saying "Multi User" for a machine with no accounts.
> Perhaps this should also be tagged "Server", because very few server
> administrators would install machines with only (/) or (/ and /home).
What about these names:
Desktop machine (all files in one partition, recommended for new users)
Desktop machine (separate partition for home directories)
Multi-user workstation
Storage server (big /var)
Storage server will be a new recipe, proposed by Margarita Manterola.
It will give probably what you need.
> - The values that Multi User chose for the partitions were ok for the
> most part. I found its choice of 150MB out of 18GB for / to be rather
> low. This is almost filled already after installing some
> kernel+module packages in addition to the base system. Perhaps this
> should be calculated by: "500MB or 5% of disk, whichever is lower".
> I also found a 20MB /tmp to be a very constraining default. I've had
> strange things happen to me in the past when /tmp has filled up, until
> I realized what was going on. It would seem that a more generous /tmp
> would be in order, or else make it part of / by default to make the
> size more flexible.
> - It seems that when one selects reiserfs for a root partition, that
> notail should be a default mount option. If the menu is explored, it
> is suggested, but I didn't explore it at first and missed that.
The installer could set this option automatically.
> Also, noatime should be suggested more highly; it greatly improves
> performance at the expense of auditing power and would seem to be a
> reasonable default for most machines.
I agree that this mount option is very usefull and making it defaulut
for (all of some of?) the recipes in partman-auto is a good idea.
> - There are other FHS trees which are not mentioned in the partitioner
> box which allows the user to choose the mount point. /opt and /srv
> were the ones I noticed. It seems that it would make sense to include
> most of the FHS mount points in this menu along with their FHS
> descriptions, except for the removable media mounts.
> The last problem, of which I can't determine the source, is that the
> partition table appears to be created with a xxx/64/63 geometry by the
> partitioner. I'm not sure why this is done. Most SCSI disks I can
> remember partitioning would have a xxx/255/63 geometry. Because of
> this, the controller BIOS issues a lengthy complaint when it sees this
> geometry on the disk it probes, and pauses the boot process for a great
> length. It complains that a 64 head geometry will not be bootable by
> any OS other than DOS. This is clearly false, because Debian boots and
> works just fine (once GRUB is installed on the correct drive). But I'm
> curious why the partition table is created with a 64 head geometry
> instead of a 255 head one which is the standard thing to do.
I think this has happened to other users also but the reason is unknown.
In order to make the situation more clear it will be helpful if you can
post the contents of the directory /var/log of the installer. In the
installed system you can find it saved in /var/log/debian-installer.
Thanks for you for your suggestions.
Anton Zinoviev
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