How to partition with Fedora 11

Hi KeremE,
I am afraid I need more details. I am a computer guy, but new to Linux. From the auto-answeres in the installer-wizard of Fedora 11 I have understood I need a root folder /, a /home folder, and a swap-partition. I have then installed Fedora 11 and left the /home-folder with most of the disk-space.

But what do I do when I want to multiboot? But I do not want Windows! What changes?

I have a 95GB-disk and have until now devided it like this

-root / - 5GB
-SWAP - 2GB
-/home - the rest

But then I cannot multiboot? Can I?

Thank you!

I made root and /home ext4!?

hke72,
please ignore this comment of mine. It is in reply to eager's post and may be considered shoptalk among experts.


eager,
what you suggest is an interesting and solid setup. However, I believe I have quite a few very good reasons for not recommending anything like that to a Linux newcomer, especially not to someone who is not used to dealing with partitions under Linux.

1. It will easily get confusing.
There are already 6 partitions in your setup, plus a lot of free space for more. Just imagine, for instance, a third Linux. Chances are too high that sooner or later nobody will be able to tell what is what. Mixing up partitions during installation is equal to guaranteed data loss. Of course, labels are a good way to avoid this, but what if you don't know how to label, or if the labels don't stick (which I experienced quite often)?

2. You may have to resize.
Unless you are an experienced Linux user, you may underestimate the space requirements for either your /root or /home partitions. The space you suggest in your setup is fine for any fresh install, but what about two years from now? What if you use lots of programmes, keep lots of sources, or do extensive logging?
Resizing (or moving) a partition that is surrounded by other partitions is already a pain, but on top of that, resizing will change the UUIDs of all partitions involved. Changed UUIDs will result in all sorts of problems with Grub, from minor annoyances to complete unbootability. I have stories to tell about this.
Putting a complete Linux system into one partition is like creating a virtual LVM space, where every mount-point can take as much space as it needs.

3. Sharing /home among several OS's may be undesirable.
People setting up a multi-boot system with several Linux versions usually have a reason for it. If they wanted to use the exact same programmes, settings, and data on all of those versions, then there is not much point in having more than one. Sharing your user settings across systems with different setups, on the other hand, may cause all sorts of confusing and seemingly inexplicable problems.
For example: Running SuSE with all the desktop environments it offers (Gnome, KDE 3.5, KDE 4, Xfce ...) and frequently changing between them, but sharing the same home directory of course, will sooner or later result in a strange mix of settings that seem to block each other and create error messages and general instability. If this happens on one and the same system, all the more it may be expected to happen across different systems.

4. A shared /home partition must needs be left intact during installation.
If you share a /home partition, it must be installed as a mount-point during installation, but at the same time you must make absolutely sure it does *not* get formatted. Now, every Linux distro has a different installation system, and some of them still aren't really intuitive (like hiding a certain important feature behind an 'advanced' button, using their own partition managers, etc.). Unless you are quite familiar with the distro you are about to install, chances are too high you may click the 'Ok' button too early - and lose all of your data and settings.

5. A separate /boot partition requires maintenance.
In my view, a separate /boot partition either is a waste of space (if you create it large enough to never have to care), or it will sooner or later be cluttered up with old kernels that you have to remove manually. For this again, you need to know what you are doing.
Example: Last year, on a Dell laptop, I decided to transform the unwanted 95 mb Dell utility partition into a /boot partition for SuSE. However, SuSE creates not one, but several kernels to choose from every time a kernel is installed or upgraded (a Xen, a PAE, etc. ...). In order to get the Wifi working, a new kernel needed to be installed - which resulted in 8 kernels residing in the /boot partition, and 85% of its space already being taken - after only one day of using that system!
This example may be extreme (and the laptop is running fine with Mint and Dreamlinux right now), but every distro will sooner or later create kernel redundancies, simply by using the automatic update features.

Torimar --

Good comments.

1.  Labeling a partition is simple: use e2label.  I don't know about labels "not sticking"; never seen this.

2.  Resizing:  LVM allows for resizing, but I (and others) do not recommend it for /root.  It's a bit of a learning curve for a newbie.  I don't recommend using UUID references; not sure why you mention that.  Rather than expanding a root partition to add more "stuff", I create a new partition.  

Putting /home in the root partition means that you cannot replace the distro without backing up your /home data and anything that it requires.  That's a lot of unnecessary work, especially when the partition is as large as you recommend.  (How many hours does it take to back up 40-50Gb to DVDs?)

3.  Yes, there may be a few times when you cannot share /home, although your examples don't seem to match the author's question.  The conflicts are not between Gnome and KDE, which co-exist quite well, but between KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0.   Even in this case, you are better off having separate /home partitions for each of the OS's rather than having /home on the root partition (which is rarely a good idea).  For one, you can temporarily mount the /home from one OS while running the other.  When you have /home on the /root partition, to copy a file (say your .bashrc) from one OS to another, you have to boot the first OS, copy the file to a USB drive or somewhere else, boot the second OS, then copy the file over.  This gets tedious very quickly.  

4.  Yes, if you install a new OS, you need to make sure that only the intended partitions are formatted, and you don't format /home or any other needed partition.  Just like you need to make sure that you don't install into the wrong root partition.  I think you exaggerate how difficult this is.  If you don't pay attention to which partitions are formatted while installing a new distro, you are not likely to preserve the previous distro.  

5.  If 100Mb wasn't big enough for your /boot partition, make it 200Mb.  

I want to make a point which might mean something.

I want to boot all the classroom computers with a smal linux where I can run G4L. I will then set them to listen. From the teacher computer I want to multicast. This means I will want to copy all but the smal linux partition (since it will be in use). In that way you will not need a boot-CD which is the reason for all of this.

Does this make anything different?

And thank you both for the insight and help!!

What I have tried now:

I read both your answeres and am trying to implement torimars's suggestion with a smal change. I made a large partition, 92GB, which will hold Fedora 11. A smal one, 1GB, which will hold a smal linux OS with G4L and 2GB swap.

hke72,

I have been trying to figure out what exactly you are planning to do, and how exactly this would affect your partitioning scheme, but I wasn't very successful. This is mostly due to the fact that G4L is not at all well documented yet.
To be honest, I did not even know that G4L could be used for listening to a multi-cast server. All I know is that G4L does not support network protocols, only backup to and from FTP. How this is supposed to work out for your project is beyond my reach.
But my advise would be to not attempt this unless you have a good and solid instruction guide/tutorial to follow. Which you obviously don't seem to have, because then you would already know how to setup the computers in your classroom.

This is the reason for my following suggestion:
There are two different ways of setting up Fedory for mass-deployment over a network which are both a lot more common and in use than the method you are planning to adopt. Both of these ways will not require multi-boot systems or specific partitioning schemes, neither on the master PC nor on the client ones. Please have a look at them before you continue on your present path:

1. Using Clonezilla SE as a multi-cast server (instead of G4L) and PXE/network boot on the clients.
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-server-edition/
If you check out the examples on that page, you will see that they are for a classroom with 40 PCs - which is pretty much your scenario. Clonezilla has a larger userbase and better documentation than G4L, which will be important should you run into problems.
Consult the following page for more information on PXE booting and PXE servers:
http://linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/pxeboot.html

2. Setting up the master PC as an installation staging server, then install on client PCs using the network installation option.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/x8664-multi-install-guide/s1-steps-network-installs.html
Customizing your kickstart file will give you the option of going for unattended installations:
http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/rhel-sag-en-4/s1-kickstart2-file.html

These ways may not be what you were looking for but they look far more promising than the G4L multi-cast that you are trying to figure out. Because I have a feeling that you could be running into no end of problems.

If time is of the essence, then it would even be faster, I guess, to take the direct route, simply clone a master system to DVD or USB media (using Clonezilla, partimage, or G4L - you will find all of them on the Parted Magic boot CD: www.partedmagic.com) and then restore it manually to one client machine after the other. Distributing a fresh installation of Fedora, this will take approximately 5-10 minutes per machine.

Hey Torimar,
thank you so much for this help. I am really greatfull!

I will try to explain better what I want. I want to be able to do three things:

1. Multi-clone one-computer for easier installation and because something always goes wrong after a while.
2. Use VirtualBox with a set of images (VM) to be used for the very different courses (some need XP others Server 2003)
3. Copy spesific course material to all the classrom computers

To help me I have bought a Buffalo nettwork disk (1.5TB) which can work as an FTP-server. I therefore have both managed to use G4L to make an image from one computer and then restoring two other computers using that image and do multicasting, copying one computer directly onto the others - using boot CD's. I had some smal problems with the MAC adress, but it was easily fixed (do you know of other problems when cloning Linux-machines? Is there a script I should run?)

Now,..

In general the people dealing with this classrom should not need to do more then 3, copying material to all the computers. No cloning and no copying of images! But as we all know what can go wrong will go wrong..so.. I want to be able to also clone.

Then working on this yesterday I posted a question on the G4L-forum and got a very cool answer. If I add some lines in the grub.conf I can load G4L into memory, not using any partition at all!

So now I think maybe I will use your idea and keep the partitions to a minimum. Only 2 - root and SWAP.

PS: I have tried for toooo long to make Clonezilla work. Without success. My problem was that I had only 1 NIC (in laptops) and even tho there is a description on the DRBL-homepage on how to set it up I gave up after a long time.

PPS: I will read the other documents you provided!

Reading the documents I see it is a recipe to install linux on many computers. But I think I will save time cloning. I can then make x times virtual machines on one computer and get everything copied.