On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 12:05:16AM -0400, Frank Carmickle wrote: > On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Janina Sajka wrote: > > > /dev/hdb2, a swap partition I didn't want to install, but the system > > > wouldn't let me go without it. > > You want it. I promise. > > Why? If someone has a system that doesn't run a lot of tasks but they > have 256 mb of memory or above I don't see a reason for it. With the > price of 256mb ddr and sdram being around $30 to $45 US there's no real > reason why a lot of people should have to be using swap. Especially with > the state the vm system has been in in kernel releases 2.4.7 to 2.4.9. We > are still feeling the effects in 2.4.10 and 2.4.12 a little. Things just > swap out and they stay there. There's one really easy way to make sure > they don't swap out. Don't use swap! That's something I would NOT recommend to any of my friends. System without swap is going to fail at one point so that you won't be able to recover. The kernel simply expects swap to be there. Also saying that 256MB of memory is enough for most people is also nonsense. In network environment the situation is very dynamic and each system might be used by more than one user, either logged in directly or using some shared services. I see many people create /boot partition to keep the kernel only. That's nonsense. It's unusable when any other partition gets corrupted and you want to boot the system to a single user mode for maintenance. Most default partioning setups are not effective so I suggest the following: / 100 - 150 MB /usr 900 - 3000 MB /var 35 - 400 MB /tmp 100 - 300 MB /home the rest swap 2 times RAM Anything else is going to be a problem sooner or later. That will keep you out of trouble in most cases for a long time. It allows you to upgrade without destroying your /home and you can preserve logs and other config files if needed. The numbers depend on purpose of the system, server (WWW, printer, NFS, Samba, etc.), office station, developer's work station, etc. The above mentioned partition structure allows you to boot into single user mode and fix most of the problems without a need for recovery disk (floppy or CD). I've done it that way many many times and it's a result of hundreds of installations in mixed environment. Whenever other's install Linux with default /boot swap / they regret it. No way to upgrade without tearing down everything while all I need is tar cvfp /home/sysconfig.tar /etc /root /whatever and preserve old configuration files and other important stuff. You have to be careful not to reformat /home partition during new installation. Of course real backups are still needed but /home is normaly big enough to easily keep my config in addition to regular user's stuff. > -- > Frank Carmickle > phone: 412 761-9568 > email: frankiec@dryrose.com -- Rafael Skodlar