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Last edited by Misbah (2012-02-14 06:05:34)
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First off welcome to Arch. Now to questions I feel comfortable trying to answer
Partitioning - I only have /, /home and swap as well. You asked where the kernel and system map went without a /boot partition, the answer is it's still in /boot it's just not a separate partition. Splitting partitions just makes the parts of your file system somewhat independent from each other. The reason you want /home separate is because if for some reason you need to reinstall the system you don't lose all your personal stuff. I had a seperate /boot for a while when I was dual booting linux distros so I could share the same boot and also use access my grub configuration from any distro. The advantages I saw in a seperate boot partiton was mainly that /boot no longer was tied to a specific distro, though there may be other advantages as well that I didn't see. For /var I've heard of bugs that cause some kind of log file to grow out of control, limiting it to a seperate partition keeps it from taking over your entire drive. I've seen similar reasons arguing for seperate /tmp as well. Probably the more useful thing a separate /var allows is for you to access the partition to see log files if something kills your root partition. This could potentially let you fix things. If /var is part of your root partition you would lose all the logs. Also having the pacman cache saved could make a reinstall a lot easier, since all the packages you've installed would be saved there.
Filesystems - I actually haven't heard much about JFS so I'd be curious to see what advantages you read about. I've generally stuck with ext3 since it's generally been the default and hasn't given me problems
nano vs vim - It's probably mainly personal preference. I learned vim before nano and I think that probably influences my perceptions a lot. Though there's been a few times I've found myself on a *nix computer for work needing to use a cli editor and happily finding vim available. Nano might have been on one of those systems, but the one of those times I actually knew vim better than the person training me, he was kind of shocked I knew how to do things he needed to look at a reference card for.
Time Zones - I find that file is part of tzdata package. If you're still missing it you might want to double check that it got installed.
LVM - You can see some information here. I don't know much about it other than it's seems to be a good thing to set up if you think you may end up needing to change partition sizes. Since you don't seem to know what it is, it's safe to assume you're not using it.
I'm still somewhat unfamiliar with a lot of the networking stuff since things have worked pretty much straight away so I'll have to leave that to someone else
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Did you use this guide? http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide because it seems like many of your questions are answered or linked there.
page 7: I believe that grub can only be installed on a ext2 or ext3 partition, so if you plan to go for jfs you would need a /boot partition formatted to one of these file systems to make it work.
/var holds all information regarding the spooling system, for example spools of mail servers, system logs, etc. Apparently it boosts the performance of pacman. I've never used it, I just go with /, /swap and /home and I'm quite happy with this setup, but there are probably a dozen threads in this forum about the issue of partitions. Just check them out.
page 9: ext3 and 3 are more widely supported, but again there are many threads about the advantages of each file system. If you plan to share your partitions with Windows, it's better to use ext.
page 11: Here's a page about LVM and what it does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Vo … er_(Linux)
That's all I can answer. Search the forums for some of your other questions.
Hope this helps and is not completely wrong.
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Last edited by Misbah (2012-02-14 06:05:23)
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