Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
On Sun, 2014-03-30 at 18:14 -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: Ken Moffat wrote: /usr : A separate /usr is a very old idea. Useful if you are on a network where /usr is an nfs mount shared by several machines. I'm sure there are other use cases, but I can't think of any at the moment. For most of us, giving /usr on its own filesystem makes no sense. We still support the capability, although I agree that it's not very common any more. I haven't done it in many years. I think it made sense back when disk was more expensive... when a gigabyte was a crazy-big number. But now, when a full desktop weighs in at about 1% of the capacity of the cheapest disk? Not so much... Much easier to use some kind of imaging process now, if you need a bunch of identical machines... Simon. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 14:57:22 -0700 Al Szymanski a...@mac.com wrote: Thank you all for your rapid responses. In specific, Aleksandar asked: Are these numbers your own estimates, or did you pick them up somewhere? I'm asking because they overestimate. These numbers came directly from the 7.5 book; 2.2.1.1. through 2.2.1.3 : pages 12 and 13. Aha, OK. I see it now. Ever since I built my system for the third time, I have been rarely looking at the book. Especially after 7.0. The list in 2.2.1.3. and the recomendation in 2.2.1.1. are, in principle, mutually exclusive. A ~10GB root partition from 2.2.1.1. includes within itself a 5GB /usr, a 5GB /opt and a couple of GB /tmp. /bin, /lib and friends in / are rarely heavier than 200-300MB and can therefore be ignored in this calculation. 10GB for system, that is, everything excluding /home, whereever you keep your sources and possibly the build dir, should be quite enough. On a related topic : if I find an error in the 7.5 book, to whom should the notice go? In the process of downloading each of the required parts, I found that the source site for Bzip2 failed. I used the Google code search and found it just fine. I also created a curl script to make the downloading mostly a bulk job with the exceptions of the files that come from SourceForge - can't curl them. Al I think lfs-support is good, but lfs-dev may be better. If you don't mind being on two mail-lists (and your mail program can handle it with reasonable ease), lfs-dev is better. -- Svi moji e-mailovi su kriptografski potpisani. Proverite ih. All of my e-mails are cryptographically signed. Verify them. -- You don't need an AI for a robot uprising. Humans will do just fine. signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
[lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
I am just trying to figure out the overall smallest size of hard drive space needed for all of the partitions. My sums from the 7.5 book come to 80 Gig plus whatever space I want for /home . [ suggested partition sizes: root LFS 10Gig/usr/src 30-50Gig /opt 5-10Gig /usr 5Gig /tmp 5Gig swap 2xRAM /boot 100Meg =~81Gig ] The online version of the book says, A minimal system requires a partition of around 2.8 gigabytes (GB). in 2.2 . I've 30Gig available on the host system, and have a 30 Gig drive that I was planning on using to start my LFS system, but now think that I can not get what's needed on a small drive. So... how small a drive can I do LFS with? Thanks and I hope to not be a bother in the future. Al -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Al Szymanski a...@mac.com wrote: So... how small a drive can I do LFS with? Thanks and I hope to not be a bother in the future. I only compile text mode tools (no graphics) and working system uses about 1-2 GB of root partition, but I use 10 Gb disk to build initial system. /alexey -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
Le 30/03/2014 23:05, Al Szymanski a écrit : I am just trying to figure out the overall smallest size of hard drive space needed for all of the partitions. My sums from the 7.5 book come to 80 Gig plus whatever space I want for /home . [ suggested partition sizes: root LFS 10Gig/usr/src 30-50Gig /opt 5-10Gig /usr 5Gig /tmp 5Gig swap 2xRAM /boot 100Meg =~81Gig ] The online version of the book says, A minimal system requires a partition of around 2.8 gigabytes (GB). in 2.2 . I've 30Gig available on the host system, and have a 30 Gig drive that I was planning on using to start my LFS system, but now think that I can not get what's needed on a small drive. So... how small a drive can I do LFS with? Thanks and I hope to not be a bother in the future. Al If you just want to build LFS: 100 Mb /boot 10 Gb / (actually 5-6 Gb could be enough) (or you may split this into several partitions, but the overall size si largely enough) 4 Gb swap (almost never used if you have more than 2 Gb of memory) So 30 Gb is more than enough. If you want to build the whole of BLFS: maybe / (if you use only one partition) should be closer to 20 Gb. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
Al Szymanski wrote: I am just trying to figure out the overall smallest size of hard drive space needed for all of the partitions. My sums from the 7.5 book come to 80 Gig plus whatever space I want for /home . [ suggested partition sizes: root LFS 10Gig /usr/src 30-50Gig /opt 5-10Gig /usr 5Gig /tmp 5 Gig swap 2xRAM /boot100Meg =~81Gig ] Actually root of 10G will work fairly well all by itself. The swap space really depends on the amount of RAM. I suggest 2xRAM not to exceed 2G. The online version of the book says, A minimal system requires a partition of around 2.8 gigabytes (GB). in 2.2 . I've 30Gig available on the host system, and have a 30 Gig drive that I was planning on using to start my LFS system, but now think that I can not get what's needed on a small drive. So... how small a drive can I do LFS with? This is what I have mounted right now: ilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda195M 56M 35M 62% /boot /dev/sda5 9.8G 6.3G 3.0G 69% / /dev/sda940G 30G 8.0G 79% /usr/src /dev/sda11 9.8G 5.8G 3.5G 63% /home /dev/sdb3 9.8G 3.3G 6.1G 35% /mnt/lfs /dev/sdb4 9.8G 8.7G 604M 94% /opt /dev/sdb5 9.8G 575M 8.7G 7% /tmp You don't really need separate partitions for /opt and /tmp and I have an unusual number of tarballs in /usr/src/. You have plenty of space. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 14:05:50 -0700 Al Szymanski a...@mac.com wrote: I am just trying to figure out the overall smallest size of hard drive space needed for all of the partitions. My sums from the 7.5 book come to 80 Gig plus whatever space I want for /home . [ suggested partition sizes: root LFS 10Gig /usr/src 30-50Gig /opt 5-10Gig /usr 5Gig /tmp 5Gig swap 2xRAM /boot 100Meg =~81Gig ] Are these numbers your own estimates, or did you pick them up somewhere? I'm asking because they overestimate. In particular, the line for /usr/src seems way too big. My own tarball dir (which cotains everything I build) is 2.7 GB, almost ten times smaller that your low estimate. -- Svi moji e-mailovi su kriptografski potpisani. Proverite ih. All of my e-mails are cryptographically signed. Verify them. -- You don't need an AI for a robot uprising. Humans will do just fine. signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
Thank you all for your rapid responses. In specific, Aleksandar asked: Are these numbers your own estimates, or did you pick them up somewhere? I'm asking because they overestimate. These numbers came directly from the 7.5 book; 2.2.1.1. through 2.2.1.3 : pages 12 and 13. On a related topic : if I find an error in the 7.5 book, to whom should the notice go? In the process of downloading each of the required parts, I found that the source site for Bzip2 failed. I used the Google code search and found it just fine. I also created a curl script to make the downloading mostly a bulk job with the exceptions of the files that come from SourceForge - can't curl them. Al -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 11:31:59PM +0200, Aleksandar Kuktin wrote: On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 14:05:50 -0700 Al Szymanski a...@mac.com wrote: I am just trying to figure out the overall smallest size of hard drive space needed for all of the partitions. My sums from the 7.5 book come to 80 Gig plus whatever space I want for /home . [ suggested partition sizes: root LFS 10Gig /usr/src 30-50Gig /opt 5-10Gig /usr 5Gig /tmp 5Gig swap 2xRAM /boot 100Meg =~81Gig ] Are these numbers your own estimates, or did you pick them up somewhere? I'm asking because they overestimate. In particular, the line for /usr/src seems way too big. My own tarball dir (which cotains everything I build) is 2.7 GB, almost ten times smaller that your low estimate. I think we are all following Al in asking the wrong question ;-) Surely, the first question ought to be What partitions will suit _my_ usage ?. In my own builds, /sources is an nfs mount (and it contains in excess of 20GB : I pruned it last week, but it has source for most of the packages in BLFS, so that I could test them for 7.5. My own builds are motly on desktops, and in general I have the following as separate filesystems : /, /boot, /home and swap. I _only_ use LFS, so I need at least two partitions which can be used for '/', and I also allocate my remaining space [ modern disks are stupidly big for desktop users ] to /scratch which does _not_ get backed up. Also, if you have the space in /home, you can keep the sources there. Re the other places mentioned : /usr/src : why do anything here ? In BLFS you are recommended to _not_ build as root (although I do in my scripts) and by default /usr/src is only writable by root. Similarly, anyone who says that the kernel tree belongs in /usr/src/linux is living in the distant past - that idea was obsolete even when I first used linux at the turn of the millenium. Building newer kernels in ~/ is good. /opt : Sometimes it is useful to keep this separate, but unless you intend to put TeX or KDE in /opt I would NOT make it separate. Even if you do intend to use those space-hogs, a bigger '/' [ ideally with room for TWO versions of /opt ] will make building a newer version on the current system _much_ easier. If you do separate /opt, please remember that its programs and libraries will link to libs in '/lib' and '/usr/lib', so sharing /opt between multiple systems on the same machine is not usually possible. Perhaps I should stress that the recommended upgrade path for LFS is to build a new system. So, if you have /opt as a separate filesystem for the first LFS you will need a simialr amount of space for the replacement system. IMHO, far better to make '/' big, with /opt and /usr part of the root filesystem. But whatever you do, if you keep building LFS or similar systems you will eventually find that your partitioning no longer meets your requirements. A rescue CD is essential [ please let me mention systemrescuecd, even though it uses zsh and is therefore not always plain-sailing when entering chroot ]. /usr : A separate /usr is a very old idea. Useful if you are on a network where /usr is an nfs mount shared by several machines. I'm sure there are other use cases, but I can't think of any at the moment. For most of us, giving /usr on its own filesystem makes no sense. /tmp : This is separate ? ken@ac4tv ~ $mountpoint /tmp /tmp is not a mountpoint At one time we used to mount a tmpfs on /tmp, but somewhere along the way (perhaps between 6.8 and 7.0) we stopped doing that, which from my POV was a shame. But I cannot see any good reason to give /tmp its own filesystem. swap : yes. The traditional theory was 2 x physical memory, but I might go with more than that if physical memory is small (e.g. = 4GB). On what is now a small disk I would not go overboard with the swap. /boot : yes, it makes things easier when you upgrade your LFS syustem by building a fresh system. For me, at the moment I have 3 MB in /boot/grub, and 5 MB per kernel - and I've got a lot of those, but they are generally slimmed-down to match my hardware. Sticking a finger i nthe air, 100MB lookss adequate. For *servers*, some other directories might benefit from having their own filesystem, it all depends on what you are doing. I've seen a use-case for separating /var/log, and I myself separate /var/tmp on my server - I also have other non-standard filesystems there. That is all a question of what fits best with what you intend to do. I used to use 6GB partitions for '/' with /sources separate (nfs), but my desktop builds increased to cover more of what is in BLFS. I now use 8GB, but that is not enough for all of the desktop alternatives, and doesn't give enough space for TeX even on my normal desktop [ I put TeX in my /sccratch partition, and bind it if I need to use it, but for a full-ish desktop including more than one DE [
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 11:44:19PM +0100, Ken Moffat wrote: swap : yes. The traditional theory was 2 x physical memory, but I might go with more than that if physical memory is small (e.g. = 4GB). On what is now a small disk I would not go overboard with the swap. I managed to come away from Al's post with the impression that he had an 80GB disk, which is where what is now a small disk came from. He actually said that he thought LFS needed 80GB. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
Ken Moffat wrote: I think we are all following Al in asking the wrong question ;-) Surely, the first question ought to be What partitions will suit _my_ usage ?. I agree. In my own builds, /sources is an nfs mount (and it contains in excess of 20GB : I pruned it last week, but it has source for most of the packages in BLFS, so that I could test them for 7.5. My own builds are motly on desktops, and in general I have the following as separate filesystems : /, /boot, /home and swap. I _only_ use LFS, so I need at least two partitions which can be used for '/', and I also allocate my remaining space [ modern disks are stupidly big for desktop users ] to /scratch which does _not_ get backed up. Also, if you have the space in /home, you can keep the sources there. Re the other places mentioned : /usr/src : why do anything here ? In BLFS you are recommended to _not_ build as root (although I do in my scripts) and by default /usr/src is only writable by root. Similarly, anyone who says that the kernel tree belongs in /usr/src/linux is living in the distant past - that idea was obsolete even when I first used linux at the turn of the millenium. Building newer kernels in ~/ is good. I use /usr/src and mount it as a separate partition. Works for me. /opt : Sometimes it is useful to keep this separate, but unless you intend to put TeX or KDE in /opt I would NOT make it separate. Even if you do intend to use those space-hogs, a bigger '/' [ ideally with room for TWO versions of /opt ] will make building a newer version on the current system _much_ easier. If you do separate /opt, please remember that its programs and libraries will link to libs in '/lib' and '/usr/lib', so sharing /opt between multiple systems on the same machine is not usually possible. I don't seem to have a problem reusing programs in /opt. The libs in /lib and /usr/lib seem to be compatible. Perhaps I should stress that the recommended upgrade path for LFS is to build a new system. So, if you have /opt as a separate filesystem for the first LFS you will need a simialr amount of space for the replacement system. I reuse it. Sometimes I build a new version of a package like KDE. $ ls -ld /opt/kde* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Feb 28 12:40 /opt/kde - kde-4.12.2 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Jun 23 2013 /opt/kde-4.10.3 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Aug 26 2013 /opt/kde-4.11.0 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Oct 24 06:53 /opt/kde-4.11.2 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Feb 28 12:52 /opt/kde-4.12.2 IMHO, far better to make '/' big, with /opt and /usr part of the root filesystem. But whatever you do, if you keep building LFS or similar systems you will eventually find that your partitioning no longer meets your requirements. A rescue CD is essential [ please let me mention systemrescuecd, even though it uses zsh and is therefore not always plain-sailing when entering chroot ]. /usr : A separate /usr is a very old idea. Useful if you are on a network where /usr is an nfs mount shared by several machines. I'm sure there are other use cases, but I can't think of any at the moment. For most of us, giving /usr on its own filesystem makes no sense. We still support the capability, although I agree that it's not very common any more. I haven't done it in many years. /tmp : This is separate ? ken@ac4tv ~ $mountpoint /tmp /tmp is not a mountpoint It is for me. $ mountpoint /tmp /tmp is a mountpoint At one time we used to mount a tmpfs on /tmp, but somewhere along the way (perhaps between 6.8 and 7.0) we stopped doing that, which from my POV was a shame. But I cannot see any good reason to give /tmp its own filesystem. It can prevent a user from running the rest of the system out of space. The reason I did it was because I build in /tmp although that is surely not common. When it is separate, I can adjust the size easily. swap : yes. The traditional theory was 2 x physical memory, but I might go with more than that if physical memory is small (e.g. = 4GB). On what is now a small disk I would not go overboard with the swap. swapping is bad. If you need swap, buy more RAM. It's pretty cheap. I don't recall ever needing more than 2G. /boot : yes, it makes things easier when you upgrade your LFS syustem by building a fresh system. For me, at the moment I have 3 MB in /boot/grub, and 5 MB per kernel - and I've got a lot of those, but they are generally slimmed-down to match my hardware. Sticking a finger i nthe air, 100MB lookss adequate. I've gone to 200Mb, but I build a lot of kernels. 100M is plenty for most. For *servers*, some other directories might benefit from having their own filesystem, it all depends on what you are doing. I've seen a use-case for separating /var/log, and I myself separate /var/tmp on my server - I also have other non-standard filesystems there. That is all a question of what fits best with what you intend to do.
Re: [lfs-support] Brand new and confused. Mostly about the 7.5 book.
Bruce and Ken. Thank you very much for your well thought out responses. 1. Where I got the 80Gig minimum is simply adding up the suggested partitions from the 7.5 book. Since I've never built a system from scratch ( except a version of CPM... back in the day), I find that I am doing a lot of reading and then reading into some of the texts and documents. 2. What I have is a 40Gig Mac Mini , completely devoted to this task and a second 30Gig HD that will become the LFS system. By the comments made here, I feel that I can proceed. 3. I am going to follow the 7.5 book as closely as I can as much of this will be simply educational value. I want to see if I can do it, if it will do what I want to do and lastly have a bit of fun messing about with it. That and 'meeting' new folks of common minds. Al -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
