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Re: [LUG] More frustrations )-:

 

On 13/06/11 18:55, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> 
> The tool compatibility thing is odd though - it appears that having your
> partition table compatible with DOS is now deprecated - fair enough -
> who uses DOS!

Sorry lost me there, I thought your complaint was it stuck the partition
on a cylinder boundary to be DOS compatible? Certainly that is what the
fdisk/cfdisk manual page suggests is the behaviour, but then it thinks
swap partitions are faster than swap files, so it is probably living in
the past.

> So what that boils down to is not slaving yourself to
> "cylinder boundaries". These disks have an odd number of sectors per
> cylinder, so not aligning them is good - unless you're using DOS. Which
> I'm not. So I didn't align them - now cfdisk won't touch it. I suspect
> cfdisk hasn't quite caught up with fdisk and still wants things cylinder
> boundary aligned. Cfdisk was nice, but I don't care - I've gotten used
> to sfdisk and bc.

cfdisk maximise option didn't do the trick?

> It would have been - and I did consider it - but I didn't fancy
> downloading another 2.5GB for a full install. Besides, I've done it that
> way before and not had any issues...

2.5GB? Eek I'm not sure my disk is that large at work (actually I know
it is 5GB and too small but I haven't stopped to fix it, actually simply
eyeing the better machine on the desk opposite me and thinking time to
upgrade it from XP).

>>> Then I tried to compile a custom kernel
>>
>> Why? If it is to save a few seconds on boot, you've already spent that
>> time many times over.
> 
> It's not to save time on boot. My last workstation had an uptime of 180
> days. I do not reboot it. Apart from my laptop, I don't reboot things,
> so I don't really care about boot time. I just like things to be
> efficient - and when dealing with slow low-power processors, if I can
> squeeze another ounce out of the system, I will. (My electric bill is
> measurably less than it was last year, despite rising fuel prices)

And recompiling the kernel reduces power consumption how? My usual thing
is having to disable power saving features to make sure other features
work reliably, which grates terribly, but usually it is all too deep to
hack away at the real problem easily.

I'm guessing the power used in a kernel compile is probably measurable
judging by the heat generated when I left some CPU heavy process running
the other day.

> I'm trying to understand the changes - that's what frustrating! And yes,
> I could have DD'd the filesystem and expanded it, but .. I still don't
> really trust those things and would rather copy things the way I've
> always copied - at least I learnt about UUIDs.

The ext2/3 tools are well tested, but I know what you mean. I did
something a few months back to prove it could be done should we every
REALLY need to do it, and had to disable a whole load of grubby low
level file system options in ext3 in order to do something using an ext2
tool, and it made me pretty nervous.

>>> Linux from scratch is looking more and more attractive ...
>>
>> If you don't know how to build a modern kernel to boot your system I
>> doubt Linux from Scratch will make it substantially easier. Presumably
>> you forgot to compile in a required driver (SATA?), or you passed a UUID
>> to the boot loader and don't have anything clever enough to make use of
>> it in the boot process (like urm initrd kernel).
> 
> You probably mean a modern kernel with modules and an initrd - in which
> case, you're right, I don't know.

I actually meant >2.6.31 but I can't really say I've had much experience
of them either, as they've all just worked apart from ones which are
pre-borked by stupid decisions by virtualisation provider.

> I've also no real need to know right
> now because I don't need it. Sure - it might be the way things are
> going, but not in my world right now. I build systems for a purpose -

I assumed this was a desktop because it was running a GUI.

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