Thinking of reorganising my systems
by hazel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4QBVD)
When I bought my Lenovo Thinkcentre, it was of course set up for Windows. It had two ESPs, one for normal boot and one for emergencies. That's a Lenovo thing btw; you press a special key and you get this alternative boot which originally took you into a rescue partition. There were a few small partitions for special Windows black magic and a huge partition for Windows itself. Also one for snapshots/dumps (sda6) and one that contained a manufacturer's reinstallation image (sda7).
I cleared most of these and reassigned them, so this is my current setup:
Code:/dev/sda1 2048 2050047 2048000 1000M BIOS boot(just in case I ever want to use GRUB for booting)
/dev/sda2 2050048 2582527 532480 260M EFI System
/dev/sda3 2582528 3606527 1024000 500M Lenovo special boot
/dev/sda4 3606528 13846527 10240000 4.9G Linux swap
/dev/sda5 13846528 218646527 204800000 97.7G General data partition, to be shared between distros
/dev/sda6 389306368 452220927 62914560 30G Earmarked for rescue tools
/dev/sda7 925573120 976773119 51200000 24.4G Earmarked for rescue images/tarballs
/dev/sda8 218646528 261654527 43008000 20.5G Slackware
/dev/sda9 261654528 325818367 64163840 30.6G LFS 1
/dev/sda10 325818368 389306367 63488000 30.3G LFS 2You will notice that partitions 8-10 were carved out of the space between 5 and 6, so my partition numbers are in the wrong order, which fdisk complains about every time I run it!
Having two LFS partitions is an old habit. One is for the old LFS and the other for the current version. Whenever a new LFS came out, I would clear the old LFS partition and create the new LFS on it, using the current LFS as build host, after which the "current" one would become the old one. I've done this for several years (it's about a 6-month release cycle), but I am becoming very disillusioned with LFS, due to creeping dependency hell. It used to be easy and fun to put together fairly quickly a nice minimalist distro that contained all the apps and libraries that I actually needed and only those. Now you can't build anything without needing all kinds of additional bumf and it definitely isn't fun any more. So I think it's time to say goodbye.
I'm thinking of installing FreeBSD as my second system, replacing LFS. I've never used a BSD before and I'm curious about how easy it is to learn. But I also want to reorganise to get my partitions into order. This would involve deleting sda6 and sda7, creating a new sda6 and moving Slackware onto it. Then I could eventually put BSD on a new sda7 and, if I do create rescue partitions, they would be sda8 and sda9. Installing SystemRescue on sda8 would be a nice project.
It would be a big job and I'd have to go about it very carefully but I think it's doable.
I cleared most of these and reassigned them, so this is my current setup:
Code:/dev/sda1 2048 2050047 2048000 1000M BIOS boot(just in case I ever want to use GRUB for booting)
/dev/sda2 2050048 2582527 532480 260M EFI System
/dev/sda3 2582528 3606527 1024000 500M Lenovo special boot
/dev/sda4 3606528 13846527 10240000 4.9G Linux swap
/dev/sda5 13846528 218646527 204800000 97.7G General data partition, to be shared between distros
/dev/sda6 389306368 452220927 62914560 30G Earmarked for rescue tools
/dev/sda7 925573120 976773119 51200000 24.4G Earmarked for rescue images/tarballs
/dev/sda8 218646528 261654527 43008000 20.5G Slackware
/dev/sda9 261654528 325818367 64163840 30.6G LFS 1
/dev/sda10 325818368 389306367 63488000 30.3G LFS 2You will notice that partitions 8-10 were carved out of the space between 5 and 6, so my partition numbers are in the wrong order, which fdisk complains about every time I run it!
Having two LFS partitions is an old habit. One is for the old LFS and the other for the current version. Whenever a new LFS came out, I would clear the old LFS partition and create the new LFS on it, using the current LFS as build host, after which the "current" one would become the old one. I've done this for several years (it's about a 6-month release cycle), but I am becoming very disillusioned with LFS, due to creeping dependency hell. It used to be easy and fun to put together fairly quickly a nice minimalist distro that contained all the apps and libraries that I actually needed and only those. Now you can't build anything without needing all kinds of additional bumf and it definitely isn't fun any more. So I think it's time to say goodbye.
I'm thinking of installing FreeBSD as my second system, replacing LFS. I've never used a BSD before and I'm curious about how easy it is to learn. But I also want to reorganise to get my partitions into order. This would involve deleting sda6 and sda7, creating a new sda6 and moving Slackware onto it. Then I could eventually put BSD on a new sda7 and, if I do create rescue partitions, they would be sda8 and sda9. Installing SystemRescue on sda8 would be a nice project.
It would be a big job and I'd have to go about it very carefully but I think it's doable.