Linux on netbooks

[Dan Ritter]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 07:29:57AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 03/26/2010 09:14 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > My current home desktop has a 160GB drive:
> >
> > /dev/sda3              46G  8.5G   36G  20% /
> > /dev/sda1             942M   54M  889M   6% /boot
> > /dev/sda4              99G   54G   40G  58% /home
> >
> >   
> Just one comment on this, why did you use all the primary partitions. (I
> assume /dev/sda2 is swap). Using an extended partition gives you more
> future flexibility. But, with a netbook it does not really matter. You
> can still use gparted to shrink the root file system and expand the
> /home file system.

Yes, sda2 is swap.

I was pretty sure that I did not need future flexibility on this
machine. I keep a strict separation in my house betwen machines
with data that I would be sad to lose, and machines that I don't
care much about. This is one of the latter. 

So strict is the separation, that I decided to experiment with 
*not* putting a RAID mirror on this machine. There is a second
disk installed, but I keep it spun down with hdparm. Once a day
an rsnapshot is taken and stored on sdb2. (sdb1 is a copy of the
boot partition, tested and then never mounted.)

If I decide to make a partitioning change to this machine, it almost
certainly will start with a new disk. I'll partition that the way I
want it, copy things over, and then have to figure out what I'll do
with an essentially disposable 160GB disk. It feels strange to say it,
but storage is now so plentiful that only specific projects warrant
thinking about the capacity. I buy 1TB 3.5" disks whenever possible,
because at $80 each there's no significant cost advantage to
buying anything smaller.

-dsr-


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