[arch-general] Install Arch in stages?
Hi, I am new to Arch, being a Mint user until now. I have the iso on CD now and ready to install. Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting? Grant McDuling Writer http://www.amazon.com/Grant-McDuling/e/B004UTH35M
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Grant McDuling <mcduling@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
Hi, I am new to Arch, being a Mint user until now. I have the iso on CD now and ready to install. Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting?
I suggest you set up everything and install just the base group + some packages you really need from the get go. Reboot into a fully-functional yet basic Arch system and use pacman to install any other apps you need. IIRC you have to set things up in one go - it should take a couple minutes for setup (or more if you problems with simple stuff like your network setup, time&date, partitioning) and another couple for downloading and installing packages (assuming reasonable fast cpu and Internet connection).
Hi, Am 08.12.2011 10:21, schrieb Grant McDuling:
Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting?
Well, probably you would like to install the basic packages and the bootloader, so you can at least shutdown your computer and reboot right into Arch at any given time. Its is absolutely possible to interrupt before you have done the basic setup, however you would then have to boot the live medium, mount your new environment and chroot into it. It's possible, but it makes things more complicated. After the basic setup you can do whatever you want to (install X, ALSA/PulseAudio, your favorite desktop environment, ...) in as many stages you need. But it is probably a good advice to do some sort of documentation about what you've installed and what modifications you've done. It is amazing how fast you forget these details and after doing the research twice (or even more often ;)) you will appreciate this kind of documentation very much. Furthermore it will help you to keep track of what you've already achieved/installed and what is still to do. Best regards, Karol Babioch
2011/12/8 Grant McDuling <mcduling@optusnet.com.au>:
Hi, I am new to Arch, being a Mint user until now. I have the iso on CD now and ready to install. Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting?
Grant McDuling Writer
Just install base + base-devel. After that, just follow this wiki : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide If you want gnome : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME KDE : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE Xfce : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce Archlinux wiki is really helpful :) Good luck. -- Frederic Bezies fredbezies@gmail.com
Grant McDuling wrote:
Hi, I am new to Arch, being a Mint user until now. I have the iso on CD now and ready to install. Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting?
Regarding disk partitioning: Arch wants to have /usr on the same partition as "/" (the root), as long as some programs needed around boot time reside on /usr. With my setup (which has no desktop environment), my disks would need (spacewise): / + /usr ext4 9G /opt ext4 9G /boot ext2 1G /var ext4 9G /rest ext4 77G /home ext4 9G with plenty of room left. The numbers don't add up to eg. 250GB because I keep several linux installations, one of which is a "hot spare" synced daily _before_ doing "pacman -Su" to upgrade the main system. What disk space do other people on this list need? clemens
On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:22:09 +0100 clemens fischer <ino-news@spotteswoode.dnsalias.org> wrote:
Grant McDuling wrote:
Hi, I am new to Arch, being a Mint user until now. I have the iso on CD now and ready to install. Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting?
Regarding disk partitioning: Arch wants to have /usr on the same partition as "/" (the root), as long as some programs needed around boot time reside on /usr.
With my setup (which has no desktop environment), my disks would need (spacewise):
/ + /usr ext4 9G /opt ext4 9G /boot ext2 1G /var ext4 9G /rest ext4 77G /home ext4 9G
with plenty of room left. The numbers don't add up to eg. 250GB because I keep several linux installations, one of which is a "hot spare" synced daily _before_ doing "pacman -Su" to upgrade the main system.
What disk space do other people on this list need?
clemens
I think it's a better idea to have either /var/lib or entire /var on reiserfs. / ext4 30Gb /var ext4 10Gb /boot ext4 100Mb /var/lib reiserfs 500Mb /home ext4 85Gb /tmp ext2 2Gb -- Leonid Isaev GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
Leonid Isaev wrote:
I think it's a better idea to have either /var/lib or entire /var on reiserfs.
/ ext4 30Gb /var ext4 10Gb /boot ext4 100Mb /var/lib reiserfs 500Mb /home ext4 85Gb /tmp ext2 2Gb
Interesting! Why do you think that? Me, I used my ears to determine the best filesystem for my workloads on the PC. Ext4 is the one with least head movement: the disks stay silent for long periods of time, then they have hectic fits and go quiet again. Compare this with freebsd's UFS2+soft-updates, XFS and JFS. I didn't dare to use ZFS on freebsd and I think I never tried reiserfs, fearing it isn't on active development currently. Oh, one other thing: my swap and home partitions are LUKS encrypted. The swap uses etc/crypttab with a random key, the key for home is on an USB dongle, so I can physically lock out people taking possession of the PC by keeping that dongle safely stashed away some place. clemens
On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:26:47 +0100 clemens fischer <ino-news@spotteswoode.dnsalias.org> wrote:
Leonid Isaev wrote:
I think it's a better idea to have either /var/lib or entire /var on reiserfs.
/ ext4 30Gb /var ext4 10Gb /boot ext4 100Mb /var/lib reiserfs 500Mb /home ext4 85Gb /tmp ext2 2Gb
Interesting! Why do you think that? Me, I used my ears to determine the best filesystem for my workloads on the PC. Ext4 is the one with least head movement: the disks stay silent for long periods of time, then they have hectic fits and go quiet again.
In my experience reiserfs made a HUGE difference in pacman <3.5 performance compared to ext4, because /var/lib had lots of small files. Then pacman DB became compressed and this gain became minimal but still noticeable. I guess this is due to /var/lib/pacman/local/. Ext4 is optimal for intermediate-sized files, like the ones you typically find in /home.
Compare this with freebsd's UFS2+soft-updates, XFS and JFS. I didn't dare to use ZFS on freebsd and I think I never tried reiserfs, fearing it isn't on active development currently.
Reiser 3.6 is considered feature-complete I think, so only bugfixes are released. It was the default on SuSE until SLES 10 and is still maintained. There are myths of it being unstable. This is because on older kernels you had to write barriers manually to prevent data corruption; since 3.1 it is the default. I heard a lot of good things about JFS, but my personal experience was absolutely terrible (frequent FS corruptions after unclean shutdowns). Even BTRFS was better. XFS is good for large files, so if you have a dedicated partition for movies -- this is your best bet.
Oh, one other thing: my swap and home partitions are LUKS encrypted. The swap uses etc/crypttab with a random key, the key for home is on an USB dongle, so I can physically lock out people taking possession of the PC by keeping that dongle safely stashed away some place.
Cool :) I used LUKS but then figured it's not worth it. Because only several important file really need encryption, I ended up with plain gpg.
clemens
-- Leonid Isaev GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
Am Fri, 9 Dec 2011 17:03:03 -0600 schrieb Leonid Isaev <lisaev@umail.iu.edu>:
Reiser 3.6 is considered feature-complete I think, so only bugfixes are released. It was the default on SuSE until SLES 10 and is still maintained.
ReiserFS 3.6 is fast on a new system, but gets extremely slow after a few years. That was at least my experience and the reason for switching to ext3 which is after a few years now still as fast as at the beginning.
Cool :) I used LUKS but then figured it's not worth it. Because only several important file really need encryption, I ended up with plain gpg.
With GnuPG you have to explicitly decrypt the single files every time you want to access the file. With LUKS this happens transparently, and you can encrypt the whole system so that nobody can see what's on your harddisk except for the kernel, the initrd and the bootloader of course. So there are use cases for both LUKS and GnuPG depending on your needs or wishes. Heiko
On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:13:53 +0100 Heiko Baums <lists@baums-on-web.de> wrote:
Am Fri, 9 Dec 2011 17:03:03 -0600 schrieb Leonid Isaev <lisaev@umail.iu.edu>:
Reiser 3.6 is considered feature-complete I think, so only bugfixes are released. It was the default on SuSE until SLES 10 and is still maintained.
ReiserFS 3.6 is fast on a new system, but gets extremely slow after a few years. That was at least my experience and the reason for switching to ext3 which is after a few years now still as fast as at the beginning.
It slows down as the partition fills up, no? That's why I used it on /var only since the used disk space doesn't really fluctuate.
Cool :) I used LUKS but then figured it's not worth it. Because only several important file really need encryption, I ended up with plain gpg.
With GnuPG you have to explicitly decrypt the single files every time you want to access the file. With LUKS this happens transparently, and you can encrypt the whole system so that nobody can see what's on your harddisk except for the kernel, the initrd and the bootloader of course. So there are use cases for both LUKS and GnuPG depending on your needs or wishes.
I know. My sensitive data is localized, and I don't care to encrypt /usr/bin/firefox. If transparency is needed, I would go with ubuntu's ecryptfs. It's simpler, but of course requires FS to be supported by linux. Not to say that full disk encryption isn't usefull...
Heiko
-- Leonid Isaev GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
Hi, Am 09.12.2011 21:14, schrieb Leonid Isaev:
I think it's a better idea to have either /var/lib or entire /var on reiserfs.
Of course everyone is free to choose and experiment with the different available options, but in general I think you don't make anything wrong when choosing ext4. Besides being the "official" filesystem, which is at least claimed to be best tested, it will at some point be upgradable to btrfs without much of a hassle. Looking at the features of btrfs and its speed right now, I think this will be the best choice at some point. Am 10.12.2011 00:13, schrieb Heiko Baums:
so that nobody can see what's on your harddisk except for the kernel, the initrd and the bootloader of course.
Well that sounds a little bit misguiding for me. Once the device is "opened" its totally transparent, so not only the kernel has access to the data, but also any other running process / program. Of course the "normal" file permissions are applied, but from the point of view of a program, which accesses the filesystem on a high(er) level of abstraction there is totally no difference whether the underlying device is encrypted or not. Am 10.12.2011 00:32, schrieb Leonid Isaev:
I know. My sensitive data is localized, and I don't care to encrypt /usr/bin/firefox. If transparency is needed, I would go with ubuntu's ecryptfs. It's simpler, but of course requires FS to be supported by linux. Not to say that full disk encryption isn't usefull...
As said above LUKS is totally transparent. Of course there is a reason for so many solutions concerning encryption to exist. However I personally prefer LUKS (dm-crypt) when it comes to whole drive encryption. Its quite easy to set up, has proven to be solid, it is even easy to have the swap partition encrypted and its quite general in the Linux world, so you can use it with most (all ;)) distributions. If you just want to have some files and/or (home) folders encrypted it makes perfectly sense to use Truecrypt, ecryptfs and/or GnuPG. However I probably would suggest everyone to go for the whole drive encryption, unless there are reasons not do so. Especially on laptops it makes sense, because they tend to get stolen or lost and in most cases there is sensitive data on them. Furthermore I don't like the idea to have everything unencrypted on my hard disk. Hard disks get broken all the time and I don't want to have some customer service to have access to my data. Moreover every disk nowadays can reallocate sectors, which then in return it is not so easy to delete / overwrite anymore, because often it is not documented whether or not a secure erase affects these sectors as well. As newer CPUs are fast enough for this little bit of overhead anyway (especially with hardware support for AES), I don't see any relevant downsides to encryption. Therefore, personally, I would always choose to go for it. Best regards, Karol Babioch
Am Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:25:16 +0100 schrieb Karol Babioch <karol@babioch.de>:
Well that sounds a little bit misguiding for me. Once the device is "opened" its totally transparent, so not only the kernel has access to the data, but also any other running process / program. Of course the "normal" file permissions are applied, but from the point of view of a program, which accesses the filesystem on a high(er) level of abstraction there is totally no difference whether the underlying device is encrypted or not.
I'm, of course, speaking of offline attacks. LUKS doesn't protect against online attacks. Which encryption you use depends on the particular use case. For really sensitive data it's best to using both, GnuPG and LUKS. Heiko
Am Fri, 9 Dec 2011 17:32:51 -0600 schrieb Leonid Isaev <lisaev@umail.iu.edu>:
It slows down as the partition fills up, no?
No. There was always enough space on the partitions. Heiko
-----Original Message----- From: arch-general-bounces@archlinux.org on behalf of clemens fischer Sent: Fri 12/9/2011 23:26 Leonid Isaev wrote:
I think it's a better idea to have either /var/lib or entire /var on reiserfs.
/ ext4 30Gb /var ext4 10Gb /boot ext4 100Mb /var/lib reiserfs 500Mb /home ext4 85Gb /tmp ext2 2Gb
Interesting! Why do you think that? Me, I used my ears to determine the best filesystem for my workloads on the PC. Ext4 is the one with least head movement: the disks stay silent for long periods of time, then they have hectic fits and go quiet again. Compare this with freebsd's UFS2+soft-updates, XFS and JFS. I didn't dare to use ZFS on freebsd and I think I never tried reiserfs, fearing it isn't on active development currently. Oh, one other thing: my swap and home partitions are LUKS encrypted. The swap uses etc/crypttab with a random key, the key for home is on an USB dongle, so I can physically lock out people taking possession of the PC by keeping that dongle safely stashed away some place. +++ Since I lost data, I got the impression that tools such as extundelete don't work proper to recover deleted data from ext4. I switched back to ext3, while I'm unsure that the tools would work better, the Internet information, perhaps outdated, claims that recovering data from ext3 would be more safe using several tools.
Hi, Am 10.12.2011 06:07, schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
Since I lost data, I got the impression that tools such as extundelete don't work proper to recover deleted data from ext4. I switched back to ext3, while I'm unsure that the tools would work better, the Internet information, perhaps outdated, claims that recovering data from ext3 would be more safe using several tools.
According to the website of extundelete it does also support ext4. But you can't judge a filesystem by some tools, which claim to do some sort of undeleting, can you? If you loose data on a regular basis that way, you're definitely doing something wrong. Get some sort of automated backup solution and don't delete files you could have a need for in the future ;). Best regards, Karol Babioch
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: arch-general-bounces@archlinux.org im Auftrag von Karol Babioch Gesendet: Sa 12/10/2011 13:15 An: General Discussion about Arch Linux Betreff: Re: [arch-general] partition sizes and filesystems (Re: Install Arch instages?) Hi, Am 10.12.2011 06:07, schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
Since I lost data, I got the impression that tools such as extundelete don't work proper to recover deleted data from ext4. I switched back to ext3, while I'm unsure that the tools would work better, the Internet information, perhaps outdated, claims that recovering data from ext3 would be more safe using several tools.
According to the website of extundelete it does also support ext4. But you can't judge a filesystem by some tools, which claim to do some sort of undeleting, can you? If you loose data on a regular basis that way, you're definitely doing something wrong. Get some sort of automated backup solution and don't delete files you could have a need for in the future ;). Best regards, Karol Babioch +++ The backups accidently are deleted, after that I directly remounted to read only, hence the data shouldn't be lost. Accidents can happen. ASAP I'll learn more about ext4 and I'll try some other tools, but if needed using a disc editor/monitor. This was the only hard accident in around 20 years of using computers. Bad luck for me. If it would have happened for my Atari's SCSI drive, a tool would have been able to recover the deleted data. What I lost were most of my important backups, when I tried to recover a Linux, so indeed, I should have made backups of the backups. Anyway, it was an accident and you should chose a FS that can be recovered. I already used several tools that claim to be able to recover ext4. Google and you'll see that it's a known issue. You can't expect that accidents never will happen. Accidents happen. Cheers! Ralf
-----Original Message----- From: arch-general-bounces@archlinux.org on behalf of clemens fischer Sent: Fri 12/9/2011 20:22 Grant McDuling wrote:
Hi, I am new to Arch, being a Mint user until now. I have the iso on CD now and ready to install. Can I do this is stages or is it best to do the complete basic install in one sitting?
Regarding disk partitioning: Arch wants to have /usr on the same partition as "/" (the root), as long as some programs needed around boot time reside on /usr. With my setup (which has no desktop environment), my disks would need (spacewise): / + /usr ext4 9G /opt ext4 9G /boot ext2 1G /var ext4 9G /rest ext4 77G /home ext4 9G with plenty of room left. The numbers don't add up to eg. 250GB because I keep several linux installations, one of which is a "hot spare" synced daily _before_ doing "pacman -Su" to upgrade the main system. What disk space do other people on this list need? +++ Hi Clemens :) I'm using one partition for all, in other words, I only have /. Usually I use around 30GiB for a Linux install, while the maximal usage is around 20GiB. Some times I'm using a separated partition for /home, but currently I'm not doing this anymore, since for data such as music productions I anyway use a separated partition. If you e.g. are using a separated partition for /boot, than IMO it depends on how many kernels you usually keep. For testing and comparing real-time kernels and full preempted kernels with threadirqs set I might have between 2 and up to 8 kernels installed. Using just one partition for all IMO has the advantage, that the disk space can be used were it's needed. 2 Cents, Ralf
participants (8)
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clemens fischer
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fredbezies
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Grant McDuling
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Heiko Baums
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Karol Babioch
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Karol Blazewicz
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Leonid Isaev
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Ralf Mardorf