Improvement to the installation script

jayhel · 2006-10-21 16:38:37

I am surprised to see a separate /boot partition in ext2!
What for???
It adds some useless complexity.
It lacks the ability to mount safely a saved /home partition without taking the risk of formatting it by mistake.
It is much more important then a ext2 /boot separate partition!
Most of the community uses lilo by default: I would suggest to stick with the majority.
It has already the Slackware look.
Why not put also the functionnality.
It's been working well for years and it is safe/straightforward to use

rawfuzz · 2006-10-21 18:06:00

jayhel wrote:

I am surprised to see a separate /boot partition in ext2!
What for???
It adds some useless complexity.
It lacks the ability to mount safely a saved /home partition without taking the risk of formatting it by mistake.
It is much more important then a ext2 /boot separate partition!
Most of the community uses lilo by default: I would suggest to stick with the majority.
It has already the Slackware look.
Why not put also the functionnality.
It's been working well for years and it is safe/straightforward to use

:?

PJ · 2006-10-21 18:06:16

It is possible to install Arch with lilo. Where is the problem?

I am not totally sure about this but I think that it is easier to setup grub with an ext2 partition. I haven't tried it in any other way. If you are going to use a precompiled kernel you will probably see that grub is a better alternative (there are no hooks in pacman which runs lilo after a kernel update).

Which community? Linux or Arch? I would like to see some numbers. I don't think that the majority of the Arch community are lilo users.

There is already a thread which is about improving the installer.
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=24321

1c3d0g · 2006-10-21 20:38:43

rawfuzz wrote:

:?

Exactly.

Jayhel: who died and made you Einstein?

jayhel wrote:

Most of the community uses lilo by default: I would suggest to stick with the majority.

Where in God's name did you pull that statistic from? Making blinded statements like that is just pure ignorance. :!:

patroclo7 · 2006-10-21 21:27:08

You can choose freely among grub and lilo, although your statistics on usage is groundless.

You are not forced to have a separate /boot partition, you can define all the partition you like. You can also mount a preexisting partition as /home without formatting it, you are explicitly asked if you want to format any partition you mount. It is quite obvious that this option is not allowed if you choose the default partitioning, but the manual selection is really simple.

chrismortimore · 2006-10-21 22:15:44

Note: this is all based on other distributions I've used, I don't know Arch's particular reason for it.

The idea behind it is that ext2 is "more compatible" than ext3. Although ext3 can be mounted transparently as ext2, bootloaders are fussy. Anyway, for a secure system, the /boot partition shouldn't be mounted rw unless changes are being made to it, so you don't ever have to worry about data corruption from power loss, etc. So yeah, basically it doesn't matter. ext2 is a perfectly safe partition.

jayhel wrote:

It lacks the ability to mount safely a saved /home partition without taking the risk of formatting it by mistake.

How on earth did you manage that? There is an amazing system in place to stop this happening, look:
To mount the partition: mount /home
To format the partition: mke2fs /dev/[node]
Clever, ain't it...

And for the record: I'm a grub user myself.

byte · 2006-10-21 23:48:45

He's not fuzzing about the choice of Ext2 but about having a separate /boot. Maybe he's hever heard about encrypted filesystems, LVM and the like.

Lone_Wolf · 2006-10-22 00:20:55

Iirc the separate boot partition is only mandatory when using auto-prepare hard disk and this overwrites also an existing /home partition if it is on the same disk.

On the other hand imo auto-prepare is ment for newbies. Users that have an existing /home partition should know enough to skip the auto-prepare and set things up the way they want.

For the record : i also use grub on 3 systems.

rawfuzz · 2006-10-22 00:53:59

jayhel wrote:

I am surprised to see a separate /boot partition in ext2!
What for???
It adds some useless complexity.
It lacks the ability to mount safely a saved /home partition without taking the risk of formatting it by mistake.
It is much more important then a ext2 /boot separate partition!
Most of the community uses lilo by default: I would suggest to stick with the majority.
It has already the Slackware look.
Why not put also the functionnality.
It's been working well for years and it is safe/straightforward to use

dude, seriously, I'm totally confused. What's your point? ext2 is used because the kernel doesn't need journaling (if you want to use a different FS, go on, be my guest, nobody's stopping you), /boot is in a different partition because 1) Once the kernel is compiled, you have no reason whatsoever to touch it. 2) If your root partition gets corrupted, your kernel is safe.

As for the /home - /boot correlation.. huh?
Lilo WAS used by the majority, most distro's come with GRUB these days. If you want Lllo, feel free to install & use it. Oh, and please show me some statistics to backup your statement.

PS: Do your own partitioning scheme.

jayhel · 2006-10-22 04:04:55

Thank you for your in input.
It gives me a feel of the folks I am with.
Personnally I feel confortable with the installer.
And now with grub.
I like Archlinux already very much.
It runs so fast on my Centrino laptop! 8)

yankees26 · 2006-10-22 12:16:05

Who are you? And what have you done with jayhel??

This reminds me of: http://bash.org/?152037

Arch Linux

#1 2006-10-21 16:38:37

Improvement to the installation script

#2 2006-10-21 18:06:00

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#3 2006-10-21 18:06:16

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#4 2006-10-21 20:38:43

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#5 2006-10-21 21:27:08

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#6 2006-10-21 22:15:44

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#7 2006-10-21 23:48:45

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#8 2006-10-22 00:20:55

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#9 2006-10-22 00:53:59

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#10 2006-10-22 04:04:55

Re: Improvement to the installation script

#11 2006-10-22 12:16:05

Re: Improvement to the installation script

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