General HD install questionsForum: HD Install Topic: General HD install questions started by: mwt Posted by mwt on Oct. 01 2006,00:26
Ladies and gentlemen,I am rehabilitating a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop (PIII/700MHz, 128MB RAM, 20GB HD, 802.11b) for my sister-in-law's elderly mother. My S-I-L wants to try to interest her in surfing the Web, email, a few games, etc., to try & keep her mind active. After looking at a variety of distros suited to the hardware, I feel that DSL with a frugal HD install would be pretty near perfect for this. But - I do have some questions... I've done the frugal install to a 100MB partition (/dev/hda1) and it comes up wonderfully - sees the wireless network and everything. However, I'd like to give her a persistent home so she can save email & such. How do I do that? I could swear I saw something somewhere re: "persistent home" but now I can't find it anywhere. Along those lines, what would happen if I partitioned the entire 20GB drive and did a frugal install? Would DSL make the balance of the space available as home, use it for something else or just waste the additional space? If these questions have been answered elsewhere, my apologies - I did a cursory search and didn't turn up anything. If they have, I'd appreciate being pointed in the right direction. Also, if there are any other suggestions for this scenario, I'd love to hear 'em. Thanks to all, Mark Posted by mikshaw on Oct. 01 2006,05:15
If you used the entire 20gb for your root partition, it would have to be ext2. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it would mean having to perform more frequent maintenance on the drive to prevent file corruption compared to a reiserfs filesystem. At least this has been my personal experience with frugal DSL.What I would do is make two partitions from the remaining space....one linux swap, 256mb should be sufficient, and one reiserfs from the rest of the space. You can use the reiser partition for a persistent home by adding "home=hda3" to your boot options (assuming the large partition is hda3). Posted by mwt on Oct. 01 2006,17:39
Thanks, mikshaw - I'll try that. I assume that the "home=hda3" boot option goes in grub's menu.lst?Mark Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Oct. 01 2006,20:54
Yes, it can go in menu.lst
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