Hi, > Thanks for the information. I did sort of know about the suspend to disk > advantage. I'm not sure it might have been tuxonice, but I feel like I remember that s2disk could use a swap file. > > I do have a question. As my reason for using swap files for swap space > is to do with having 2GB of RAM and so using the RAM times two rule for > swap means 4GB which is more than I think my laptop's HD wants to take > permanently (I mean it would restrict the other partitions more than I > would want to go). I think this real is a bit outdated, fro m a point where paging out to disk was common. I have a laptop with 2G of ram too, I've never had more than 1G of swap. On that machine, with few acceptions, I see very little swapping to disk and usually large amounts of free ram, which meanbs swap is basically just for s2disk, and with compression, 1G seems to be enough. > Now I have heard people mention about LVM allowing > more dynamic allocation of disk space, how possible are the following > and how safe are they: > > * To expand and shrink volumes with data on (eg. an ext4 partition > holding the main system)? this is certainly doable, in some cases you can do it on line (the filesystem is mounted while you expand it). Personally I would do it off line with a livecd if neccessary. Increasing or decreasing the size of a logical volume is very easy, you then have to grow the filesystem afterwards or shrink it first. > * Suspend to disk, does it work if swap is a volume in LVM? I'm going to try this soon, I don't see any reason why not but that doesn't mean it'll work. > * Is there any issues with using swap in a volume? Same, I don't see any, but I'l try it in the next week or so and know better. > * What is the options for installing grub when using LVM? Remember my > preference has been to install it to the partition boot sector. well, logical volumes (like partitions) live in a volume group, which is a set of physical volumes who's space has been put in 1 pooll. You can certainly install grub on any of the partitions involved. You need to have atleast 2 partiotions total, they could be different drives. This is because /boot can't be on lvm, but root can be. So assuming you want to put everything but /boot on lvm, you could certainly install grub on the partition that is /boot. Note that if you put root on lvm, your initrd will need to setup lvm and mount root, personally I make my own initrd's for this, its not hard, but I think somedistros (debian and gentoo come to mind) have tools to do this. HTH Trev
