A couple of questions before trying Arch

TioDuke · 2009-08-06 18:12:04

Hi,

After 5 years using the same distro (openSUSE) I decided I wanted to try Arch. Mainly because of its KISS philosophy and beacuse I want to learn more about linux.

Now to my questions:

First off, I was reading the "Beginners Installation Guide" and I found the following regarding partition sizes:

From the guidelines above, the example system shall contain a ~15GB root (/) partition, ~7GB /var, 1GB swap, and a /home containing the remaining disk space.

My machine has a small disk (80 Gb only) with the following partiton schema:

30 Gb ntfs (for some windows-only proprietary applications I need in order to connect to the office; also my music files are here)
2 Gb fat32 (not used anymore)
10 Gb ext2 (unused)
512 Mb swap partition
27 Gb xfs /home
10 Gb ext2 SUSE's / (root)

My first thought was to merge the two unused partitions for Arch, keep /home and then, when I would finish configuring Arch to my liking, ditch SUSE and merge its current root partition with /home. Now that leaves only 12 Gb for Arch. I plan to use KDE as DE (in fact kdemod) and to install the usual stuff for music, web browsing, office (OOO), some development IDEs (like eclipse and netbeans) and some servers for testing and learning (Apache, Tomcat, JBoss and Glassfish).

Do you think 12 Gb would be enough? I could reduce the ntfs partition to gain a little more space for Arch but that could do at most a total of 17 Gb partition.

Now to the second question:

In the "Beginners Installation Guide" the following is used to create a new user:

useradd -m -G users,audio,lp,optical,storage,video,wheel,power -s /bin/bash archie

Where the -m flag instructs the useradd program to create the home directory of the new user. I wanted to keep my old username. Would that command destroy my current home directory? What is the best thing I could do? Perhaps rename the directory to something else and then copy the files I want to keep to the newly created home directory? Any advice will be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

denisfalqueto · 2009-08-06 18:18:33

My advice goes to your two questions:

Don't share /home between Arch and SUSE. It is prone to problems because of different versions of applications. You could just share the documents (provided that the same versions of applications are used) but you should not share the configurations (dot files).

My $ 0.02.

.:B:. · 2009-08-06 18:24:31

/var can do perfectly with 3 (or even 2) GB. Swap can be shared and if 512 MB is enough for you there's no need to increase it. My root partition is a whopping 4 GB, and I still have room:

/dev/sda5             4,0G  2,6G  1,3G  67% /
/dev/sda6             1,6G  536M 1003M  35% /var
/dev/sda7              24G   12G   13G  49% /home

Seems my /var is smaller than I thought too . Keep in mind my installation is rather lightweight though, I run Openbox, if you use KDE or Gnome and use some heavy apps you'll easily get 5+ GB on your root partition, so you have to check your SuSE setup to see how much space you'll need - Arch will certainly not have a smaller footprint.

rson451 · 2009-08-06 18:24:45

First off, I was reading the "Beginners Installation Guide"

I like you already.

12GB is more than enough for an entire Arch install /home and all included. I have an Arch vm at work that is using up less than half of a 4GB virtual disk image. I too would recommend not sharing /home between too installs for the reasons above.

TioDuke · 2009-08-06 20:49:57

Thank you for your replies.

I'll follow your advice and I'll go for a 12Gb partition where I'll also put /home. If everything goes well with Arch, then I'll ditch SUSE and move the new /home to the 27 Gb partition which I plan to merge with the most-likely-to-be-deleted SUSE root partition.

Thanks again. You've been very helpful. If for whatever reason Arch doesn't turn up to be the right distro for me, then I still plan to be hanging up on here to enjoy your company.

Last edited by TioDuke (2009-08-06 20:51:02)

ngoonee · 2009-08-07 00:29:09

My root partition is at 12 GB currently, but that's cos its basically two root partitions, I have a chroot as well. This is on a full-bells install, Gnome and lots of random stuff I like.

/ plus /home should be fine, initially, but keep an eye on your usage, especially if you happen to like to keep real data on your home (like, install programs to ~/program_name or save your movies/music on home). Preferably those are kept in another separate partition.

And as mentioned before, you read the beginner's guide first? You'll be popular, no doubt.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-08-06 18:12:04

A couple of questions before trying Arch

#2 2009-08-06 18:18:33

Re: A couple of questions before trying Arch

#3 2009-08-06 18:24:31

Re: A couple of questions before trying Arch

#4 2009-08-06 18:24:45

Re: A couple of questions before trying Arch

#5 2009-08-06 20:49:57

Re: A couple of questions before trying Arch

#6 2009-08-07 00:29:09

Re: A couple of questions before trying Arch

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