Questions before I doo this

lduperval · Apprentice Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 189

Hi,

I have a few questions before I install gentoo:

- I use the latest version of gnucash (from CVS a couple of days ago). I looked at the list of apps available in rc4 and gnucash is at 1.6.x. Does that mean that it isn't available as 1.8.x or is it one of thos masked deals?

- Similar question for Open Office

- I usually have multiple partitions but the documentation doesn't specify how one should size multiple partitions. My disk looks like this:

/dev/hda8 2506024 1088692 1417332 44% /
/dev/hda5 23270 5995 16074 28% /boot
none 257668 0 257668 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7 3678732 3367912 310820 92% /home
/dev/hda3 1052096 914080 138016 87% /mnt/windows
/dev/hdc1 2058292 1797232 261060 88% /mnt/windows-d
/dev/hda9 8626604 7866612 759992 92% /usr
/dev/hda10 3906632 3212248 694384 83% /usr/local
/dev/hdd1 5622540 3909356 1713184 70% /usr/local/soft

I was thinking of merging a9 and a10 and I would probably take a piece of a8 also, but make a5 larger. Should I also have a separat /var partition?If so, how large? The installation doc doesn't really go into that kind of detail.

I think I had another one but I forget.

Thanks in advance,

L

eta · n00b Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 43

seems like version 1.8 of gnucash is masked.

clacour · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2003 9:16 am Post subject:

The LVM How-to is in Tips and Tricks. Search that forum for "lvm howto" and you should find it easily.

My thoughts on partitioning:

LVM is good. It does have a learning curve, though, and particularly doing LVM on Gentoo may be a bit tricky. If you know LVM and you know Gentoo, the howto tells you exactly what you need to know. If you're new to either one, expect some problems along the way.

Two places in Gentoo are much larger than you'd expect.

/usr/portage is the "portage tree", where it keeps all the ebuilds, profiles, etc. It's up to about 90 MB now. However, there's a subdirectory of it, /usr/portage/distfiles, where it keeps all the downloaded source code.

After a while, that can get very large (Several gigabytes). As long as you're not emerging something right now, you can delete any or all of what's in there, but it might mean having to re-download some stuff. On the other hand, if it installs clean once, you usually won't be using that package again -- maybe another version, but that means a new download anyway.

The other thing that gets huge is /var/tmp/portage. This is the working directory that portage uses to build (i.e. compile) packages. I just built a new Gentoo system and gave /var 1 GB. It wasn't enough -- I had to bump it to 1.5 GB. (Which is where LVM is sweet -- it's very easy to expand/shrink it.)

I'm experimenting with having one large partition (about 10 GB) for both /usr/portage and /var/tmp/portage. I discovered (the hard way) that portage doesn't like links for those two, but you can change what directory is used in /etc/make.conf, so now /usr/portage is the 10 GB partition mount point, and /usr/portage/var is what is used instead of /var/tmp/portage. Main thing it gives me is that I only have one partition that I have to worry about space issues on.

On the subject of sizes of partitions:

I'm playing around with multiple partitions just for the hell of it, but what I normally do on my home machines is a boot partition and one big one for everything else. Even with LVM, managing multiple partitions is sometimes a pain. (By the way, you don't HAVE to have LVM to change the sizes of partitions. Parted or Partition Magic will do the job, too. LVM's just a lot easier.)

Since you're using multiple partitions now, and asked the question, I'll assume you're going to be stubborn about it (I would be

), so here's my comments on sizes:

If you're going to have multiple partitions, I'd suggest the following mount points:

/var, /tmp, /home, /opt, /usr, /usr/local, /usr/portage

/etc, /bin, /dev, /sbin, and /lib should always be part of "/"

If you go with that scheme, "/" doesn't need to be terribly large. (The system I just set up is using about 64MB. I set mine up as 256 MB, but 100 would probably be plenty.)

On Gentoo, /var will need to be very large (around 1.5 GB) if you're going to use the standard location (/var/tmp) for workspace when building packages.

/tmp depends on your usage. For most applications, /tmp usage is fairly light (a few megabytes is a fairly large one). If you're not using anything that uses an unusually large amount of temp space, I'd make it 256 MB.

/opt depends on whether you're going to use packages that go there. I personally prefer to put applications that are going to have a long lifetime on my system in /usr, but I don't care about it so much that I'm willing to go in and dink with something like KDE. If they want to put it in /opt, I'll live with it for now. (The /opt vs /usr argument is one reason I tend to prefer one big partition.)

It's up to you whether you have a separate /usr/local and /usr/portage or just make them subdirectories of /usr, but they're both likely to grow and shrink a lot. It's usually desired that /usr be more stable. (Again, this is meaningless if everything is in one big partition.) If you are going to have them, I'd make /usr/portage at least a gigabyte. (Maybe a quarter of that if you're going to clean out the distfiles frequently.)

/usr/local is hard to call, because it depends on how you use it. I use mine for my own scripts, and a few other odds and ends that I've originated. For that, 50 MB would be plenty. Lots of packages decided that an argument between /usr and /opt wasn't enough, they should distinguish between /usr and /usr/local, and argue about THAT. (Can you tell I'm a little fed up with this silliness?) I made mine 256 MB, for what it's worth.

You should know better than anybody how big /home should be. :wink:

Good luck,

Charles Lacour

lduperval · Apprentice Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 189

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2003 8:32 pm Post subject:

clacour · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2003 2:27 am Post subject:

I won't address the masked packages stuff, since Cyrillic already did a better job of it than I would have. (I might print that off, it's handy info to have.)

clacour · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2003 9:01 pm Post subject:

Ok, I've got the script. It's still rather on the crude side, and could probably be done a LOT more efficiently in Python, but awk is what I know. I was moderately proud of myself for figuring out how to get the true value of the USE variable...

I used a script name of euc (emerge use-changed), and I'll call it here so I don't have to use something awkward like "<script-name>".

Usage:

euc
or
euc <package>

where package is something like "elvis" or "links". It does a find command with that name, so you're limited to one package name. It shouldn't hurt anything if it matches multiple packages, but for now, you have to say
euc elvis
euc links

and NOT "euc elvis links"