On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Mitch Bradley wrote: > Another important advantage to partitions is that the existence of a boot > partition isolates the firmware from changes in the filesystem used for the > root.
can you explain this a bit more? > Advantage #2 that you cite below is also quite valuable - it makes it easy to > preserve user data while replacing/recovering/updating the system software > using the "blast on a fresh image" method. only partially true, since sugar wants to install apps in /home, trying to reset things requires reimaging /home as well. David Lang > [email protected] wrote: >> On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Chris Ball wrote: >> >>> Hi, [adding fedora-olpc-list to CC] >>> >>> > Are we stuck with 1.1GiB or do we think we can reduce that further? >>> >>> Well, there are a few things going on here. We have activities and >>> content (and will probably add more activities and content) that's >>> currently part of the 1.1GiB, but is actually in /home, and isn't >>> going to count towards our "system partition" use. So we need to >>> split that out in our calculations; currently 162MiB of the 1.14GiB >>> used is in /home, so we're actually just under 1GiB. >>> >>> It seems likely that we can reduce the system partition size by one >>> or two hundred MiB without extreme effort, but I haven't looked into >>> where the space is going yet. However, after we do that we're going >>> to want to add more applications, such as OpenOffice, so I wouldn't >>> want to commit to staying under 1GiB for a single system partition. >>> (It wouldn't be necessarily *bad* to use more than that, if the >>> things we're going to add are valuable and we've cut out the cruft >>> we're not actually using.) >> >> so you are moving away from abiword (which I understand write is a >> derivitive of) and adding openoffice?? >> >> given the capabilities of these machines, and the bloat of openoffice, I'm >> not sure that's a wise move. >> >>> So, let's go ahead with the discussion about whether we want to use >>> partitions and what they should be called/what filesystems we should >>> use for them, without committing on a size just yet. If one of the >>> fedora-olpc readers could come up with a report listing our installed >>> RPMs by size on disk, that would rock. >> >> while it is traditional to use seperate partitions, on a 4G flash drive is >> it really worth the cost of guessing sizes wrong? >> >> advantages to using partitions >> >> 1. filling up one partition won't affect others (making it easier to run >> tools to recover space) >> >> 2. you can wipe one parition in an upgrade without affecting data in other >> partitions >> >> 3. it's possible to set different permissions on different paritions >> (nodev, etc), which increases security if users only have access to write >> on those partitons. >> >> disadvantages to using partitions >> >> primarily boils down to one >> >> you have to decide ahead of time how big to make the partitions, and >> changing this later is non-trivial. if you guess wrong you can end up >> running out of space in one place while you have extra space in others. >> >> >> >> In my opinion, there are two reasonable approaches >> >> 1. multiple system paritions so that you can have two completely >> independant systems on the box and dual boot between them >> >> >> 2. single partition >> >> >> since this is only a 4G drive, I would tend to go with #2. >> >> in the current discussion the proposal is to leave 1/4 of the disk space >> unallocated, but unavailable to the users 'just in case' it's needed for >> the OS later. >> >> the multiple system partition approach has a similar problem, but there it >> gets a lot more value for the space. >> >> the fact that it takes ~1G for a minimal desktop system is very >> disappointing. >> >> David Lang > _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
