Using Linux

This evening I undertook the upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04. It went pretty smoothly. I started by using these steps for moving /home to a new partition. I learned something new in the process: when exiting Gnome using Ctrl+Alt+F1 all it takes to get back into Gnome is Ctrl+Alt+F7. I have been stuck a few times before because I didn’t know that and it is nice to realize now.

The next step was to insert the Fiesty CD I had burned and restart the system. My plan was to install fresh on a new partition and mount /home at the new partition I created for it. I was impressed that there were only 7 steps to the install and no interruptions after those 7. Ubuntu makes it easy to walk away for awhile once the file copying starts. Quite a contrast to Windows XP where one is constantly interrupted during the installation to ask for more input.

Because I have all kinds of hard drives and partitions I had to go through the manual install. Since I feel like I know what I’m doing in that area it was not hard. I did come across this bug in the installer though. I wasn’t trying to change the size of any partitions but it was a little scary because when editing a partition the New Size box had a value that was from a Free Space value on another partition. It was very strange. I didn’t change any of the numbers and they were ignored. I’m not sure what would have happened if I attempted to change them.

After booting into the new installation I realized that I had forgotten my plan to move one of my external hard drives to an eSATA connection rather than a USB connection. At this point I attempted to do this. The reason it matters is because as an eSATA connection the drive is /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdc. It comes before my two internal SATA drives. Upon reboot the drive wasn’t automounted and that was a bother. I looked in /etc/fstab and the file was using UUIDs to point to the drives. I decided to be lazy and just do a reinstall to fix the issue. It would give me a change to not automount all of the extra partitions I have on the computer as well.

So basically I restarted with the CD again and fixed my problems. I didn’t create mount points for all the partitions I didn’t want mounted and the eSATA drive came up as it should.

I’m happy.

Now just to make sure I have all the software I want.

Every once in a while I dig up old drives that seem to still work (although all drives will fail eventually, right?). Today I’ve got a Fujitsu MPA3035AT 3.5GB IDE drive that I’m going to partition and use for swap for all my (planned) Linux partitions. I found a Fujitsu obsolete product information page for the series it is from even.

I remember reading somewhere that the ideal space for a swap partition is no greater than 1.5x the system memory. Right now that means I’ll dedicate 1.5GB to the swap partition.

I’ve been debating with myself about what to use the remaining ~2GB for. I thought about using it as a small, unreliable backup space for my USB flash drive (which is actually 4GB); or using it as backup for other crucial hard disk data. Today I realized that it might be the perfect space for an installation of Puppy Linux. I’ve been using a derivative of Puppy known as Muppy from a CD off and on for quite a while. It has saved me many headaches in the past.

Now it’s just a matter of turning off the PC and getting on my hands and knees to do the actual hardware installation.