Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 16:58 UTC (Tue) by ken (subscriber, #625)
In reply to: Fedora 19 released by dowdle
Parent article: Fedora 19 released

well generally I do manual partitioning when installing and only create 1 partition. But when I tried this in fedora19 I got some gui I could not navigate(I'm sure its great but I never seen that one before and it was not obvious how to make it do what I wanted) so I tried the automatic version. that one configured itself into an unusable setup mainly due to creating the not needed swap partition.

I really wish they had put effort into making gnome-disks usable for installation instead of inventing yet another gui for handling disks. I'm sure someone thought that it was easier doing a new one but it's not easier for the user.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 17:41 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

I suggest to read the rationale behind the storage partition on
http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2013/03/04/refreshing-storage/

Storage partition was always a complex matter. Your case is different which is why "custom partition" exists.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 17:49 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (3 responses)

I've seen people recommend Fedora use gparted, etc (and you mention gnome-disk) as an alternative to the installer having its own partitioner. The only problem is that those applications DO NOT do everything the installer needs. I would go into details on that but frankly I'm not familiar with them all... but I'm pretty sure software RAID, LVM, and RAID on LVM are a big part of it.

If you want to use gnome-disk prior to doing the install, it is on the GNOME media so go for it. I believe every spin has fdisk so anyone who wants to use that from the command line can. I make my own Fedora remix and include gparted and sometimes use gparted before I do an install.

I agree with you that the installer's partitioning functionality is more clunky than some other programs but I have used the installer's partitioning functionality in Fedora 18 and 19 (I followed the pre-releases and did a lot of installs) and it works quite well. It isn't the broken mess that some claim it to be. You should be able to do most everything you want to do with the custom partitioning option... but yes, if you are very new to the installer you are going to have to read the screen.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 14:26 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

> but I'm pretty sure software RAID, LVM, and RAID on LVM are a big part of it.

The big problem is that the world has moved on and BIOSes no longer have the capability of booting from modern hard drives without some effort on the part of the end user and/or installer.

We have machines that are BIOS-only, have a EFI stub that boots a BIOS analog, and pure EFI. We have 'regulare' 2TB and smaller drives that can be partitioned successfully with just a MBR style partitioning scheme and we have 2TB and larger drives that require GPT. We also have 2TB and smaller drives with 'regular' 512byte sectors, 2TB and larger drives with large sectors, and then SSD drives that are a bewildering array of different sized write blocks, erase blocks, and emulation to support 512byte blocks with a performance penalty.

Then on top of that we require no less then two versions of grub in order to boot either a EFI or BIOS machine.. when it's really often not entirely clear if a machine is a EFI or BIOS machine.

This may sound like a PITA, but we have lots of choice! And lots of choice and billions of variables is the only way we ever get progress, right? (end sarcasm)

The 'most correct' way of partitioning a drive nowadays from what I can tell is to have at least 4 partitions and to have it using GPT partitions. Although obviously other partition schemes will work.

1. You need a 'BIOS Boot Partition'. This a very small, just a meg or two at most, partition that is required for BIOS compatibility. It actually works quite well and I dare say that when you are moving drives around I think it is actually more reliable then trying to just use a tradition grub install. There is a partition flag you set to make it into a 'bios boot partition'.

2. You need a 'Boot partition', formated ext4 to have all the kernel/grub stuff.

3. You need a swap partition. On modern machines with lots of RAM I usually make it just 8GB.

4. You need a partition (or more) for 'everything else'. Hopefully in the near future we can just set it to BTRFS and not have to give a crap anymore and go back to something that more closely resembles the way BSD folks run things.

I fully applaud the Fedora 'confusingly simple' interface. The chances of users actually ending up with a effective partitioning scheme when they are given a chance to meddle with things is vanishingly small. It definitely needs work still, but it's a lot better then F18.

A couple notes:

Fedora now users TMPFS for /tmp. So you want plenty of swap to get any big files out of memory if you need to.

Suspend-to-disk seems quaintly antiquated nowadays. The time that it takes to write out 8-32GB of RAM to disk is excessive to say the least. Maybe as disks catch up to speed with the rest of the system then it will have a purpose again.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 15:35 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link]

Oh, you make it all sound so SIMPLE ;)

Remember, UEFI machines can boot in BIOS compatibility mode. And when you're doing a UEFI install to gpt you don't need a BIOS boot partition, you need an EFI system partition. Which may be required to be marked bootable or may be required to absolutely *not* be marked bootable, depending on circumstances. It certainly has to be of the correct filesystem, type, and mounted in the right place. You can apparently do native UEFI installs to msdos-labelled disks, which makes no goddamn sense but that of *course* does not stop some manufacturers from doing it (we only figured this out in the last week of f19 release, so that case is busted in f19, unfortunately).

You don't actually need a separate /boot or swap partition, but it's a good idea to have them.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 22:49 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

Well, antiquated or not, I probably use suspend-to-disk (aka "Hibernate") four or more times each day on my main "workstation" (I use the term loosely). Mainly because suspend-to-ram (aka "Suspend") no longer works. It did at one time, but any more when I select that option the machine suspends but momentarily, then resumes on its own accord. I'll have to check its BIOS to see if there's some flaky bits in there which need tweaking, but I don't recall ever seeing any. Its a niche-vendor custom mini-itx MB with custom AMI BIOS to match, and I've never been particularly impressed. Fedup doesn't seem to work either, at least not from F17 to F18 which is what I've tried. Mostly it leaves me clueless -- no big trick -- but on reboot the new fedup kernel sometimes mentions an incorrect BIOS value, suggests perhaps its time for a new one, and hangs.

I like your partitioning scheme. One might also mention that grub2 requires a larger embedding area or BIOS boot partition than grub1 when booting from an mdraid. 63 sectors -- 31kb -- is not sufficient. Make it at least a MB, like drag said.