I just discovered LFS today and I am really excited about it, in theory. The reality is that I am still in law school and thus will now have time to really commit myself to trying to build my own distro until after the bar, September. So here is my question, my winter-break project is to drop Mandrake 9.1 and move to Slack. Since I'll be starting off with a fresh ~10GB HD, I was wondering how you all would suggest setting up my partitions with an eye toward giving LFS a go in the future.
Thanks,
Andy

" how you all would suggest setting up my partitions with an eye toward giving LFS a go in the future."

You can use the same swap partition for every Linux OS installed on your machine. You can also set up a single boot partition and keep all of your kernels there under different names, or you could set up a boot partition for each distribution, or you could not have separate boot partitions. Separate boot partitions are leftover from the days when hard drives were too big for the BIOS to handle, so for the sake of simplicity I sugget that you dispence with boot partitions and use:

/dev/hda1 - 3G - Mandrake
/dev/hda2 - 512M - swap
/dev/hda3 - 3G - Slackware
/dev/hda4 - 3G - LFS


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Steve Stites

I am thinking that I want to dump Mandrake, so would this also be an OK setup:
/dev/hda1 - Slackware 3GB
/dev/hda2 - 512 M - swap (good guess on my RAM size)
/dev/hda3 - LFS 3GB
/dev/hda 4- /home whatever is left

I guess my question is it better to keep my user files on a separate partition or store them with the distro?

"I guess my question is it better to keep my user files on a separate partition or store them with the distro?"

It is better to keep you data on a separate partition. However /home will contain a mixture of user data and system configuration files. So when you have two different distributions using the same /home you could, for example, have two different versions of KDE using /home/user/.kde Even so, /home on a separate partition is probably better than /home appearing in every distribution.

Another possibility is to put all of your data in /home/user/data and put /home/user/data on /dev/hda4.

"I am thinking that I want to dump Mandrake,"

When you first install Slackware it will be unstable for a while. What you should do is keep Mandrake until Slackware is stable. Then format the Mandrake partition and use it for LFS.

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Steve Stites

If I make /dev/hda4 /home/user/data then each distro will have a /home for settings, but could access /home/user/data to get my personal files. Is that the idea behind your suggestion? Would that involve setting up permissions such that /home/user/data would not be available to user2? More clearly, initially, would only root have access to /home/user/data and I would have to give user permission to access it?

"If I make /dev/hda4 /home/user/data then each distro will have a /home for settings, but could access /home/user/data to get my personal files. Is that the idea behind your suggestion?"
Yes.

"Would that involve setting up permissions such that /home/user/data would not be available to user2?"
That could be set up several ways:

You could deny access to user2.

You could give user the same name on all of your distributions and all could thus access /home/user/data.

You could have several user names on the same distribution or across different distributions. Then you could use a group name to give all users access to /home/user/data. Set up /home/user/data with a group name of ingroup. Make sure that the group permissions are rw for every file and directory in /home/user/data and that the group name for every file and directory is ingroup. Then on every distribution make all users members of ingroup.

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Steve Stites

One final question:
I could call /dev/hda4 anything I wanted? My understanding that because each disto would have its own /home for settings so calling /dev/hda4 /home/user/data is just keeping with naming conventions?

"I could call /dev/hda4 anything I wanted? My understanding that because each disto would have its own /home for settings so calling /dev/hda4 /home/user/data is just keeping with naming conventions?"

I would change your question to ask, "Can I mount /dev/hda4 anywhere I want?" and the answer is yes. You can create any directory name that you want and mount /dev/hda4 there.
I am in the process of slowly switching from SuSE to Fedora. When I am running in Fedora and want to move some files from SuSE to Fedora I do something like:

mkdir /SuSE
mount /dev/hda3 /SuSE
cp /SuSE/etc/wvdial* /etc

I also have a directory called /backup which is used by both SuSE and Fedora. Both distributions have a directory named /backup and an entry in /etc/fstab mounting /dev/hdg4 on /backup.

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Steve Stites

Thank you very much.