Fedora Core 8 & Logical Volume Management

This weekend I decided that after two years with Fedora Core 5 on my workstation that it was time to update because I was missing out on the Linux versions of some great software like Scribus 2.3.4 and Gimp 2.4.

The big computers have had a way of partitioning hard drives that makes it easy to add or remove storage as required without having to shutdown and reboot.

As a fan of that kind of technology it's nice to be able to "test it out" so to speak.

So now the current version of Fedora Core 8 makes it easier to set up partitions using LVM (Logical Volume Management).

But because I haven't really paid much attention to this before because it hasn't really been documented very well how to set it up.

Basically you need 4 partitions:

/boot
/ (root)
/home
/swap

The /boot partition must be located outside of the LVM container though.
The Volume Group shows the big picture and contains all disk volumes. A physical volume is a single hard drive and a logical volume can be spread over one or more physical volumes.

So my hard drive is a small 40 gigabyte model, which is just fine for the stuff I want to do like surf the net, participate in blog and web forum discussions, create documents like the TRUWinnipeg pamphlet, and watch videos on YouTube.

I really don't need a whole lot more than that. I wish I could do desktop video editing, but that is probably best done with a full fledged PC workstation.

So onto the partitioning.

I wanted to set up a separate /home and on the Fedora Core 5 system I had previously I also had a CD-R sized partition on /share that I could use to archive documents to.

This time I also decided not to install Windows XP because I don't really use it, except to scan in the odd image, but that happens very rarely.

The /boot partition cannot sit inside an LVM because Linux won't be able to see it.
The /boot partition must be about 100 megabytes, but not much more than that. It is where the Linux kernels are kept, and you can keep more than one on your system and switch between them if needed.

The /home partition should maybe be about 10 gigabytes. This is where program configuration files are stored, as well as your documents and e-mail messages, so it's important to keep this large enough. When I backed up my e-mail messages I found that 1,000 messages going back about 2 years could be stored in about 250 megabytes of storage... And Firefox browser settings and bookmarks both could fit on one CD-R.

And you really should have a separate /swap partition that is set to double the size of your current amount of RAM.

But because I'm new to this LVM thing I couldn't get it to work as I understood the concept at the time. So instead of a separate /home directory I let Anaconda choose the default setup, which is two partitions -- /boot and / (root).

The restore operation of Firefox and Thunderbird data went very well. Before repartitioning I had copied the following directories onto a CD-R disc:

/home/jim/.mozilla/firefox
/home/jim/.thunderbird

Both those directories store Firefox bookmarks, passwords, and plug-ins, e-mail and login information to all e-mail accounts. This marks the first ever time I have been able to successfully restore my e-mail from a previous installation, and it sure felt good to still have those e-mails to refer to when I need to.

Next time I put a new version of Linux on my workstation I'll know enough to do it the recommended way, which has the benefit of not having to reformat the whole hard drive. I could then leave the /home directory intact and just have Anaconda reformat / and /boot and install onto those two.