Re: partition magic-ally

["prash" <iprash@gmail.com>]

thanks everyone for your suggestions.
i do accept that lvm was a little difficult to grasp, but once i got
the hang of it, it was a breeze. thanks roberto for a great idea!
the thing i forgot to do that made me confused for awhile, was that i
did not set the single partition to be of type "Physical Volume for
LVM", leading to constant lvm errors like "no physical disk available
to install logical volumes". (i had forgotten to follow the basic
concept: rtfm! it's right there on page 50 of the installation guide
(section 6.3.2.2: configuring lvm)
but once i did this it was really smooth sailing. you define nice
descriptive names for each logical volume like root, boot, swap etc...
and give them sizes.
finally you choose each "partition" and define the type of the file
system(ext3 or swap) and also what the actual file system is for each
partition (like /boot or "swap area").
finish changes and write to the partition table and you're done!
there was a slight hiccup when lilo said it cannot write to either mbr
or the debian partition and i said go ahead without a boot loader (i
could always do this later, or install grub), but when the system
rebooted, lilo started up without any complaint.
anyway, long story longer, here's a "df -h" for my system (and now that
i have lvm i can change it whenever i want to, woo hoo!):
prash@advaita:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vol_root-root
                      6.4G  105M  6.0G   2% /
tmpfs                 253M     0  253M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/vol_root-boot
                       94M  9.9M   79M  12% /boot
/dev/mapper/vol_root-home
                      4.0G   33M  3.8G   1% /home
/dev/mapper/vol_root-home_prash
                      9.9G   33M  9.4G   1% /home/prash
/dev/mapper/vol_root-usr
                      3.5G  1.7G  1.7G  52% /usr
/dev/mapper/vol_root-usr_local
                      9.9G   33M  9.4G   1% /usr/local
/dev/mapper/vol_root-var
                      1.6G  105M  1.4G   7% /var

(vol_root is the name i gave to the single physical volume and
vol_root-root, vol_root-boot etc. are the logical volumes)
thanks again for everyone's help, looks like i am good to go.
-prash.