Jim,
On Sunday 24 April 2005 10:42, Jim Flanagan wrote:
On Sunday 24 April 2005 10:04, Jim Flanagan wrote:
Also, how would I uninstall one of these installations? Do I simply delete the hdx and change the grub entry?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. You can always install over an existing installation. You can also erase (write over) a partition from a running Linux as long as you don't do it to your root partition or any other partition that is still mounted or which holds files critical to the continued normal operation of the system.
Hi Randall,
What I meant to ask was what is the preferred way to uninstall a suse linux installation? Is there an uninstall routine, or do you just wipe out that partiton?
Preferred? Not that I know or can think of. There are probably some "best practices" related to installation planning and configuration management, the need for which you're now coming to understand.
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Now, as to planning, is there any good reason to make seperate partitions for /, home, usr, var? I have seen advise that at least making a seperate home partition is recomended, in case you want to do an upgrade later. But, as I can see from recent and old posts, upgrade is not the best way, rather new install is. This being the case, is there any compelling reason not to just put the entire install on one partition?
It's more tedious to re-install, but far less likely to create big problems (or just a lot of little ones). It is for all practical purposes impossible to write installation software that can accommodate all the possible forms an installed system may have evolved into over the course of its production life.
Ideally, you install into a new partition, keeping your old installation intact as a fall-back. SuSE's installer is good enough to detect all bootable file system volumes (including non-Linux ones) and build a Grub configuration that makes them all available to you during boot.
I used to go with a very fine-grained partitoining scheme, but no longer. Now I just put /home on a separate partition. Unless there's no need for any data continuity between an old installation and a new one, having home directories completely separated from systems ones is a very good idea and significantly simplifies the installation of a new system. As it turns out, when I install non-RPM-based packages, I typically put them all in /usr/local, so now I'm thinking that having a partition for that might be a good idea, too.
Beyond that, disks are so large that it's easy to simply use a very liberal estimate of the amount of space the system will need (say, 20 GB) and install everything except /home there.
But by all means, keep your home directories on a separate partition.
Don't forget some swap space, too. You can swap to a file, but there's a little extra overhead, and it eats into your file system allocation.
Randall Schulz
Thanks for the help Randall. All good info. I'll be doing the permanant installs soon. Many thanks, -- Jim Flanagan linuxjim@jjfiii.com