Alan E. Davis schrieb:
Now, however, I've tried three or four times to install on an existing
partition. Grub will not install over the ubuntu grub, or else
something else is crazy.
Why do you do this at all? Grub is already in your MBR, so why bother
with it again?
May I ask a few questions?
- Live CD only installs over a clean partition. How can I resume
an installation?
Boot the CD again, perform the steps to mount your already created
filesystems (incl. bind-mount of /proc and/dev, enter chroot and start
with (or after) the last step you finished before.
- I only have a unsupported atheros wifi card for connection. I've
been using it for years. No easy way to connect by wire. Any ideas?
On x86 they're supported by madwifi, isn't this true for amd64?
- I have an 80GB fast SATA drive and three slower 7000 RPM drives.
What partitions are best kept on the fast drive to maximize
performance (I have basically an all purpose workstation).
I don't think you'll see much difference. However, with a setup like
this, I would look into using LVM or EVMS logical volumes eventually
combined with a software RAID5 over the three slower discs (in case
they're equal in size.
My /home
will be about 100GB: is it wiser to split it up into a smaller core
/home with several slower archive and storage partitions (Library,
Project archives, Videos, Music)?
I usually use one LV for each user's ~ (/home/johndoe, not /home). This
way, I can increase size for each user individually w/o having to setup
quota. I can even use different filesystems depending on users needs
(i.e. large media files are best kept on XFS). In addition, I can also
setup kernel automounter (autofs), so that they're only mounted when the
user is really logged in.
- Advice about UUIDs? I lost a partition (a large one) over a
misidentification of a partition when the Ubuntu scheme started
swapping around names of devices. Old /dev/hda became /dev/sda and
old /dev/sda became /dev/sdb. What a mess that turned out to be.
This can't happen with logical volumes, because they get a unique name
of the form /dev/<volume group>/<volume>.
Here's my setup:
sda1: /boot (~64M, ext2)
If you don't want to use an initramfs:
sda2: / (256M, xfs)
sda3: LVM (to end of disc, no fs)
If you use an initramfs:
sda2: LVM (to end of disc, no fs)
Then create LVs for everything else:
/usr: /dev/vg-machinename/usr (3G, xfs)
/var: /dev/vg-machinename/var (1G, xfs)
/opt: /dev/vg-machinename/opt (1G, xfs)
/home/user1: /dev/vg-machinename/user1 (1G, xfs)
/home/user2: /dev/vg-machinename/user2 (1G, xfs)
swap (if needed): /dev/vg-machinename/swap (twice the RAM)
Some Gentoo related volumes:
/gentoo/distfiles: /dev/vg-machinename/distfiles (2G, xfs)
/gentoo/build: /dev/vg-machinename/build (2G, xfs)
/gentoo/overlays: /dev/vg-machinename/overlays (1G, xfs) (portage tree goes
into /gentoo/overlays/portage)
However, in your case, I'd use the 80G disc as a system disc with one volume
group (system-<machinename>) and setup the three slower drives as either RAID
5 or JBOD, containing a second VG (data-<machinename>), where the first hosts
/boot, /, /usr, /var, /opt, swap and the /gentoo volumes, while the seconds
hosts all the /home volumes and additional data volumes (/data/music,
/data/photos, ...) which are shared by several users.
HTH...
Dirk
