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Topic: Frugal Install, Do I really need more than one partition

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musther

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Posts: 20
Joined: April 2005

Posted: May 10 2005,21:46

When using the frugal install script, it asks for a main partition, and then twice asks for a second partition, once for myDSL and once for.. i forget now. When I was just messing around, I installed it on hda1 and gave it the same partition for the other bits, it all seems to work fine, so do I need to use more than one partition? Is this intended to allow you to install updated versions of DSL without removing your myDSL stuff and personal files, like having a system and a home partition? And finally, if I should use two partitions, how large does the primary DSL partitoin need to be, I guess 52mb or so should do it?

Cheers

RoGuE_StreaK Offline

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Posts: 418
Joined: Jan. 2004

Posted: May 28 2005,09:39

From what I can tell (only just about to start with frugal, having a few issues...), yeah you can put everything in the one partition, and yeah the use of multiple partitions is primarily for ease of update later - you just replace the "base" partition to get your updated DSL core.
And yeah, I think anything over the size of iso image is fine.

If you can spare it, a swap partition would come in handy too.
Clivesay recently wrote up a good "howto" for frugal installs.

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clivesay

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Posted: May 28 2005,12:09

Short answer is "Yes".

Long answer is (maybe I should add to the howto......)

One partition is OK for everything. You can even update your frugal by copying over the KNOPPIX file so you don't lose everything else. I would only recommend this method if you have quite a bit of ram to spare. Remember, everything you add while you are running DSL is loaded into ram. If you have under 512mb ram, I would at least recommend a swap partition if you want to run say, openoffice along with other large hungry apps. You may not use the swap but good to have as a safety net as opposed to locking up your PC!

Two partitions and a swap are really ideal. If you put your mydsl files on a seperate partition they are easy to remove or add while you are running DSL since they aren't on the same partition as the running DSL image file.

Where frugal gets it's power, IMO, is when you use that second partition for a persistent /home and /opt. As I said before, in a base frugal install, all you add is residing in ram. By default, /home, /opt and /tmp are also loaded to ram so they are writable directories. If you assign /home and /opt to a HD partition, they are now on a HD and NOT residing in your ram. Therefore you don't have to worry about those directories and your saved files eating up ramspace. Everything resides on the hard drive.

I hope this helps.

Chris

2 replies since May 10 2005,21:46

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