Re: Partition Scheme for installing Debian Squeeze
Wally Lepore <wallylepore@gmail.com> writes:
> I have 1 gig of DDR RAM. Thus your suggesting I make the swap 2 gigs?
> I do let my system hibernate. Also, if I set the swap to 2 gigs, then
> the Appendix section 'C3' says,
>
> On some 32-bit architectures (m68k and PowerPC), the maximum size of a
> swap partition is 2GB. That should be enough for nearly any
> installation. However, if your swap requirements are this high, you
> should probably try to spread the swap across different disks (also
> called “spindles”) and, if possible, different SCSI or IDE channels.
> The kernel will balance swap usage between multiple swap partitions,
> giving better performance. -end-
>
> Not sure if this applies to me and my system?
Your architecture is i386 (or amd64 if you can go that way, or
brokenarch), so m68k and PowerPC won't apply.
Hibernating is unlikely to work. If it does work, it involves to store
the contents of the RAM in the swap space, which may occupy 1GB. Have
another GB or more swapped out already, and you're running too low on
swap space with only 2GB of it.
To give you more numbers: Open a scanned A4 page in gimp, and gimp can
easily take about 4.7GB when you used "high" resolution for archiving
when scanning the page. Your X-session with emacs and i3 and rxvt may
hold about 500MB resident in memory. You also want some memory for disk
cache and other stuff you're running, so 1GB is really tight. (You may
want to experiment with vm_swappiness to see if that can speed things up
for you.) Add to that the amount of overcomittment and then imagine
what happens when even only one application starts to actually use some
of the memory it has allocated.
Of course, you can do without an X-session. If you want to use a web
browser, you'll probably want something fully featured like seamonkey
rather than a text browser, and that adds about another 500MB or more
resident. So you need more RAM than you have already, and now you want
to limit your swap space to only 2GB?
> Based on the above, can a directory/partition be named /usr/local ?
> and /var/mail ? I thought a directory can have only one name (i.e.
> /usr -or- /local -or- /var -or- /mail).
You need to distinguish between file systems, partitions and
directories. You can create file systems on partitions and you can
create directories in file systems. You can mount file systems on mount
points which are usually directories --- however, the distinction
becomes unclear because you usually mount partitions (that contain file
systems) on mount points.
So you can have, for example, a file system F with a directory named
"usr" and mount a partition P on it that contains a file system F2 that
contains files that are expected to be found under /usr (or other
files). Now F2 can contain a directory named "local", and once P is
mounted on /usr, you can mount a partition P2 which contains a file
system that contains files to be found under /usr/local (or other files)
on /usr/local. When you do that, you will find the files that are in F2
under /usr/local.
Each directory and file can have only one name, unless you create a
link. There are symbolic links (like pointers in C) which work with
both directories and files --- and hard links (like another file name)
which work with files and not with directories. You can remove a
directory a link points to and the directory is gone (and the link
remains, pointing to nothing). You can remove a file (file name) that
has a hard link and the file will continue to exist until all the links
have been removed (All the hard links point to the same file like the
file name does, and the file becomes inaccessible when there are no
names to refer to it and only processes using it can still use it. Also
see man 2 unlink.).
You can mount any partition that contains a supported file system to any
directory that doesn't already have a partition mounted to it. Using
appropriate options with the mount command, you can mount a file system
to several directories at the same time. You cannot mount something to
a directory that isn't available, like you must mount (or have
available) /usr (and thus /usr/local) before you can mount something to
/usr/local. Hence the entries in /etc/fstab need to be in the right
order for things to be mounted.
Partitions are not named (unless you label them, maybe). They have
UUIDs, see man blkid.
Now don't go overboard with mounting and keep things simple.
--
Debian testing iad96 brokenarch
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