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(slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

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Using Windows and Linux together is not a trivial task but there are some interesting solutions.

I do not recommend Red Hat for desktop.

Notes:
  • Those pages are written by people for whom English is not a native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be expected.
  • This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It cannot replace the best teachers and the best books.
  • The site contain some obsolete pages as it develops like a living tree... Some links on older pages are broken. Please try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link (see HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate if you can mail us a correct link.

Search Amazon by keywords:

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Old News ;-)

An online Unix tutorial: 14 lessons from Glenn Chappell.  Nice introduction. New home as of Jan 2006.

HP Throws Weight Behind MySQL, JBoss

HP Throws Weight Behind MySQL, JBoss
By Clint Boulton

HP (Quote, Chart) stepped up its commitment to open source software Monday by pledging to offer and support the MySQL database server and JBoss application server software in its servers.

The Palo Alto, Calif. systems vendor said it has inked agreements with those open source purveyors to certify and support MySQL and JBoss software on its servers.

Jeffrey Wade, manager of Linux Marketing Communications at HP, said the certifications factor in the company's Linux reference architecture is a software stack that covers everything from the hardware to the operating system, drivers and management agents.

Deployed on HP ProLiant servers, the open source Linux Reference Architectures are based on software from MySQL, JBoss, Apache, and OpenLDAP. The company's commercial Linux Reference Architectures are based on product from Oracle, BEA and SAP.

Both MySQL and JBoss will join the HP Partner Program and receive joint testing and engineering support on HP's hardware systems.

Wade told internetnews.com the added layer of MySQL and JBoss support addresses one of the largest concerns customers have today in opting to pick open source technology over mainstay proprietary products such as Microsoft (Quote, Chart)Windows, Sun Microsystems' (Quote, Chart) Solaris or UNIX.

"We can provide support for that entire solution stack and we're also now giving our customers flexibility in choice and the types of solutions they want to deploy whether that's a commercial or open source application," Wade said.

Bob Bickel, vice president of strategy and corporate development at JBoss, said commercial use remains somewhat constrained because a CIO doesn't know whom they can turn to for support.

"They don't know who they can turn to for indemnification," Bickel told internetnews.com. "Yeah, it works great and it's cheap but what happens in the middle of their big selling season if something goes down. Who do they turn to and get it from. What HP's doing is taking an all encompassing view of this with certification and testing."

Testing keeps customers from guessing what version of a Java virtual machine, operating system, MySQL or JBoss product can all work together in a guaranteed way, Bickel explained.

MySQL Vice President of Marketing Zack Urlocker said companies such as Sabre are using an open source stack for business applications. Partnering with HP, then, provides great validation for MySQL and JBoss software.

"A couple of years ago the big knock on open source was that it might be good on the periphery or Web applications, but was not quite ready for business critical applications," Urlocker told internetnews.com. "Now, the No. 1 issues have been support. People who have had a lot of success with Linux are now looking at how to use a whole open source stack."

The deal is truly symbiotic. While MySQL and JBoss get backing from a technology driver such as HP, HP gets the added credibility of being cozy with open source, a label many enterprises and HP rivals, such as IBM (Quote, Chart) and Dell (Quote, Chart), are working toward.

Linux sales are trending tall regardless; according to recent hardware server and database software studies from high-tech research outfit Gartner.

Despite legal threats from SCO Group and competition from Microsoft, Gartner said Linux continued to be the growth powerhouse in the operating systems server market, with a revenue increase of 57.3 percent in the first quarter of 2004.

Gartner also found that Linux siphoned market share from UNIX in the relational database management system (RDBMS) market, a niche that grew 158 percent from $116 million in new license revenue in 2002 to nearly $300 million in 2003.

Red Hat and USB devices LG #80

Using USB devices is really cool. I used to hate USB devices, but now that I can have tons of stuff attached to my Linux boxes without them using up all the resources, I like it. I just wish more companies would help create Linux drivers for their products. I would never use a USB hard drive for anything except backups and I wouldn't rely on USB for stuff that requires a lot of cpu power. Firewire is good for heavy stuff. All the other USB devices (mice, keyboards, printers, webcam, camera, etc) are a good match for USB because they require low overhead.

I copied over 3 gigs of data to my hard drive and I got seek errors. I thought there could have been bad sectors, so I ran mkfs with the "-c" option, and it took all day. Eventually, mkfs bombed, so I am going to wait a little longer before I use the external hard drive with Linux. Most likely, I will check hardware compatibility and go out and buy a new external hard drive (maybe firewire instead of USB).

SPATULA =- Nick Johnson's Homepage -= SPATULA why linux sucks

Testing? What's that? If it compiles, it is good, if it boots up, it is perfect.
-- Linus Torvalds

Welcome to the beginnings of my "why linux sucks" page. There isn't much here just yet, but there are so many reasons, both technical and non-technical, that linux sucks that this page will surely fill up quickly.

I've opened the page up to linking again...except from slashdot.

Here's a short list of Linux flaws that make it look silly:

I don't expect this list to be up to date; Linux is impossible enough to keep up with as a user, and it's even harder to keep up with how broken and lame it is this week. In general, the further something is down the list, the newer the information is. It's almost surprising how much of the older items still hold true today, until you consider the fragmented and undirected development effort.

Before you wet the briefs your mommy bought for you at Target and frantically search for a link to email me something about how "it's not like that anymore" or "how dare you insult Linux! I will h4x0r you!" or other such standard Linux sycophant drivel, consider for a moment that I just don't give a fuck what you have to say. I understand that it can be upsetting to you to see your precious OS exposed as the garbage it is. I've heard it all before, so you can save your energy for something more complex and important to you, like learning how to masturbate.

Perhaps the greatest crime of Linux is the production of nonportable code. The Linux c0d3rz wave the free-software flag, but they're just as bad as Microsoft in making software that can run only under their OS.

Check out my favorite Linux joke. Also read aard's linux joke

Also check out this spoof press release about Tonka's new Linux distribution.

Linux kiddies wet the bed

News Articles, Interviews, etc

Throughout all of these, it's interesting to note the typical Linux kiddie reaction to proof that their OS sucks ass. It's always something like:

  1. The test wasn't "fair"
  2. What about new kernel x.y.z?
  3. You can't expect <reasonable expectation>
  4. The people doing the test must be mean/biased
  5. It wasn't tuned properly
  6. They didn't look at the latest release of Red Hat x.y!

They really seem like 4-year-olds who have just been denied a pack of gum in a grocery store.

And here is something that's sure to convince; hit the button below to perform a search for Linux security flaws on rootshell.com. There are plenty. The last time I searched on "FreeBSD" there were 9 hits. Linux: 121. Linux sucks.

SPATULA =- Nick Johnson's Homepage -= SPATULA

Taken from http://kt.linuxcare.com/latest.epl on 2/3/2000, this is just one example of serious design problems with Linux, and serious questions about its present and future direction, considering the plans laid out by its creator. Apparently speed and efficiency aren't as important to Linus as having a pretty filesystemish interface. Hope you didn't want to do anything useful with your CPU in userspace...

NSA PRESS RELEASE -- NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY SHARES SECURITY ENHANCEMENTS TO LINUX, 2 January 2001

Recognizing the critical role of operating system security mechanisms in supporting security for critical and sensitive applications, National Security Agency (NSA) researchers have been investigating an operating system architecture that can provide the necessary security functionality in a manner that can meet the security needs of a wide range of computing environments. The NSA is pleased to announce that it has developed, and is making available to the public, a prototype version of a security-enhanced Linux system. The prototype includes enhancements to Linux that provide new, stronger protection against tampering and bypassing of application security mechanisms and greater limits on the damage that can be caused by malicious or flawed applications.

The security mechanisms implemented in the system provide flexible support for a wide range of security policies. The currently implemented access controls are a combination of type enforcement and role-based access control. The specific policy enforced by the kernel is dictated by security policy configuration files which include type enforcement and role-based access control components. This release includes a set of sample security policy configuration files designed to meet common, general-purpose security goals.

Both the President's National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism and the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee have recently called for increasing the federal government's role as both user and contributor to open source software. "Open source software plays an increasingly important role in federal IT systems. I'm delighted the NSA's security experts are making this valuable contribution to the open source community," said Jeffery Hunker, Senior Director for Critical Infrastructure at the White House National Security Council.

Since this system is a prototype, there is still much work to be done to develop a complete security solution. Anyone interested in experimenting with the system or getting more information about it, should visit the project web site at http://www.nsa.gov/selinux. This site contains the source to the system as well as some technical documentation about it.

NSA is presenting this system under the terms of the GNU General Public License with the intention to work with the Linux community to refine these enhancements for eventual inclusion into Linux. The system is not intended to be a complete security solution for Linux, nor does it correct any flaws that may currently exist in Linux.

The Information Assurance Research Office of the NSA is responsible for conducting research and advance development of technologies needed to enable the NSA to provide the Solutions, Products, and Services to achieve Information Assurance for information infrastructures critical to U.S. National Security interests. The security-enhanced Linux prototype was developed in conjunction with research partners from NAI Labs, Secure Computing Corporation (SCC), and MITRE Corporation. Researchers at the NSA implemented the security architecture in the major subsystems of the Linux kernel with some refinements provided by NAI Labs. SCC, MITRE, and NAI Labs also assisted the NSA in developing application security policies and enhanced utilities for the system.

[Sept 27, 2001] -  Mandrake Linux 8.1 ML 8.1 overview | Order your Mandrake Linux 8.1 pack! | Download

phorum - Community Discussions - Best Linux Hard Drive Partition

Author: Chugunok (---.ne.mediaone.net)
Date:   06-13-01 19:48

Partitionning of your HD heaviliy depends on the type of server you are building, as well on the distro you are using... For MTA you'd want your /var/spool/mail as big as you can afford, for example. For an "out-of-the-box" Web server using RH or MNDK make your /var/www partition twice the size of you estimates for the Web pages. Keep in mind that not all distros put web, FTP data directories in /var. Check with the docs of your distro. If you are using MySQL, its data directory also defaults to /var/lib/mysql, so calculate the size of the /var partition accordingly.

Here is a snapshot of one of my systems. It is an intranet server/info portal. 

  / - 500M 
  /usr - 2000M 
  /usr/local/ - 2000M 
  /opt - 1500M 
  /var/www - 20000M 
  /var/lib/mysql - 5500M 
  /home - 1000M 
  /tmp - 1000M 
  /var - 2000M 
  /dos - 100M -

It's a 2x36GB mirror. If you have any questions, let me know 

Author: Joe   Black (---.dialup.mindspring.com)
Date:   06-17-01 17:25

Will partitioning make a server more efficient per se? Maybe so. The underlying disk technology may be a big factor in performance too. RPMs, disk cache, and controllers are all important. Hardware RAID is very nice, and has less overhead than software RAID.

A few thoughts: 

  /var has to be writable and should be fairly sized. 
  /usr could be read-only - mount -o remount,rw to update 
  /boot 50 - 100 megs if you want a lot of kernels 

  swap 2 times memory is the current recommendation for Linux 
  /tmp by being separate from /, a full /tmp != full root

Other partions as Chuquonok said may make sense.

Also, with seperate partitions, you can use different filesystem types depending on usage. reiser, XFS, ext2 all have advantages and drawbacks. Similarly mount options like "noatime" may be beneficial for a mail partition.

Things to ponder are "if this filesystem filled, what would it affect?". Similarly, "if this filesystem is oversized, how much space am I wasting?"

About.com: Speed up your IDE drives(Nov 11, 2000, 18:38 UTC) (1272 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by john)
"If you're using a recent DMA, UDMA-33 or even UDMA-66 IDE drive and motherboard and feel that under Linux, disk access seems slow compared to Windows, you may be right. In some situations, Linux doesn't automatically enable DMA for IDE hard drives."

Nov 11, 2000 About.com: Backup: Save Data Without Tapes, 18:06 UTC) (811 reads) (1 talkbacks) (Posted by john)
"Luckily, Linux makes it easy for you to maintain periodic backups of your important files without needing to run a tape every single night. Non-tape backups are also often easier to restore files from when only one or two files are needed. And with hard drive sizes now routinely exceeding 20 gigabytes, many users find themselves with lots of unused free space, some of which can be put to good use as backup storage."

[Nov 09, 2000] Linux.com: Setting Up Networking in Linux: Mandrake  

Linux.com: Linux Hardware Resources: Linux On Laptops

[Oct 21, 2000] Signal Ground: Stupid dd Tricks (or, Why We Didn't buy Norton Ghost)

"The company that employs Tom and me builds big pieces of food processing machinery that cost upwards of $400K. Each machine includes an embedded PCs running -- and I cringe -- NT 4. While the company's legacy currently dictates NT, those of us at the lower levels of the totem pole work to wedge Linux in wherever we can. What follows is a short story of a successful insertion that turned out to be (gasp!) financially beneficial to the company, too."

"...Ghost works well; it does exactly what we wanted it to. You boot off of a floppy (while the image medium is in another drive), and Ghost does the rest. The problem lies in Ghost's licensing. If you want to install in a situation like ours, you have to purchase a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) license from Symantec. And, every time you create a drive, you have to pay them about 17 dollars. When you also figure in the time needed to keep track of those licenses, that adds up in a hurry."

"It finally occurred to me that we could use Linux and a couple of simple tools (dd, gzip, and a shell script) to do the same thing as Ghost -- at least as far as our purposes go. ... The Results? We showed our little program to management, and they were impressed. We were able to create disk images almost as quickly as Norton Ghost, and we did it all in an afternoon using entirely free software. The rest is history."

[Oct 21, 2000]LinuxDevices.com: RedBoot -- an open source boot/debug environment (whitepaper)

"RedBoot is a new embedded system debug/bootstrap environment from Red Hat. It is designed to replace the existing debug/boot tools CygMon and GDB stubs. It provides a complete bootstrap environment, including network downloading and debugging. It also provides a simple flash file system for boot images."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]
TechRepublic: When Linux panics: Managing an OS emergency

(Apr 27, 2000, 23:53 UTC) (Posted by john) (1 talkback posted) (1786 reads)
"Yes, even with a workhorse like Linux, a user can suffer from the ultimate misfortune of a system failure or file-system crash. ...I'll explain how you can create a boot floppy (post-install) and use fsck, and I'll list the files and directories that you should back up in case your Linux computer ever goes down..."

Linux Journal: Getting Small with Linux, Part 3

(Apr 27, 2000, 05:58 UTC) (Posted by marty) (2 talkbacks posted) (1280 reads)
"How would you like to save a couple thousand dollars on that new firewall/router by making use of that old 486 SX/25 you've got lying around? What? You took out the hard drive? No problem; we don't need it. Yes, those old Ethernet cards will do just fine."

See also 

(Other Softpanorama Pages)

Mandrake

Linux-Mandrake for Windows.

Linux.com: Setting Up Networking in Linux: Mandrake  

LinuxNewbie.org: Installing NVIDIA Drivers for Mandrake(Jun 07, 2000)

Cheap CDs

Linux System Labs - The Price Busters! Mandrake 8.1 (2CDs)  $3.38 Free shipping until October 7th

Linux Central the -root for Linux resources

Mandrake Linux 8.1 (3 CD set) pre-order $5.95

Discount Linux CD's (RedHat, Debian, Slackware) $.99 CD

CheapBytes Home Page

Replicated Media Versions 2 CD-ROM Install Set Preorder $3.49 3 CD-ROM Set (Install CDs plus Supplemental) Preorder $4.99On the cheap Linux

E-books

Linux Documentation Project Guides:

Book part of LDP is mostly static with several outdated entries (Installation and getting Started is one example -- Matt Welsh wrote a better (commercial) book for O'Reilly.   The most interesting and dymamic part are HOWTOs.

Important Documents

Accorted documents:

Tutorials

FAQs

Man Pages

Usenet

Technical Support

Adding hard drive to Linux

Adding a Second IDE Hard Drive LG #38

Consider the advantages of adding a second drive to your system. True, replacing your present drive with a new, low cost, high capacity one would seem a better alternative, but... If you can pick up a used 1.3 gig drive for a coupla bucks at a flea market or you local computer dealer (he might have accepted it as a trade-in), then this is indeed the cheapest way to upgrade your storage capacity. If you are planning to update the kernel on a production system, but are afraid of breaking some of your apps, then it is a simple matter to copy your entire ~/, /etc, and /usr directories to the second drive, where they would remain pristine and untouched by the upgrade. If a few hundred megs would tide you over for a few months, until you finish paying off your new patio or gambling debts, then save those bucks until next year, when 20 gig IDE drives will be a loss leader at your local "Five 'n Dime".

Adding a Linux Hard Drive by Dirk Hart

I was asked to configure a second IDE hard drive for a RedHat 7 Linux system.

I was at a loss as to how to describe this new drive to Linux and after half an hour I realized that the drive had been autodetected at the time of the last boot. A little research showed how IDE drives are named:

Then fdisk was used to partition the drive: fdisk /dev/hdc. I selected the old partitions and added a single linux partition, making sure the partition type was 83 (Linux).

When that was done I used mkfs to make a filesystem. Since there was just one partition it was named /dev/hdc1: mkfs /dev/hdc1.

I made a mount point: mkdir /usr0 and mounted the new filesystem: mount /dev/hdc1 /usr0. The filesystem can be unmounted using umount /usr0.

Lastly, I made an entry in /etc/fstab describing the new filesystem so it would be mounted automatically mounted at boot time. This was tested using mount all and observing that the new filesystem was indeed mounted.

A.P. Lawrence, SCO Unix Consultant-Adding a hard drive

Adding a second hard drive

You add a hard drive, and configure the file systems on it, by running "mkdev hd".

People used to older Unices may expect more complications, and may expect to have to use "mkfs" after hand editing kernel configuration files to add the appropriate block and character devices. You certainly can do all that if you want, but "mkdev hd" is a front end that makes it much easier. If you are curious as to what goes on behind the scenes, look in /usr/lib/mkdev. The "hd" command there is a shell script, and is fairly self-explanatory.

You generally have to run 'mkdev hd' twice. If I remember correctly, the kernel already has the code for the second IDE drives, so in that case it's only once. But for SCSI drives, the first invocation puts the driver code in, and the second (after a reboot) allows the partitioning and division of the drive.

For SCSI drives, the first pass asks you the name of the SCSI controller. If you don't know, and if your primary drive already is SCSI, look in /etc/conf/cf.d/mscsi. The end of the file might look something like:

wd Srom 1 0 0 0
asc Sdsk 0 0 0 0
asc Sdsk 0 4 0 0
 

(This happens to be a machine with an EIDE cdrom and a scsi disk using an "asc" controller, plus a second scsi disk at ID 4). You'll also be asked about which controller (if you have only one, it's "0"), what bus (probably 0) and the target ID. and the lun (almost always "0").

There are twin-channel controllers: for these, one is controller "0", the other is "1". You can follow the internal cables to see which one your drive is connected to.

If you aren't sure what SCSI devices are present, the "sconf" command can help you on modern systems. Prior to OSR5.0.5, this existed but could crash your system in multiuser mode, but now is safe. Here's the output of "sconf -v" on one of my machines:

Sdsk alad 0 0 0 0
Sdsk alad 0 0 1 0
Stp alad 0 0 3 0
Sdsk alad 0 0 4 0
Srom alad 0 0 6 0
 

For example, this tells me that a tape drive (the Stp line) is attached to an alad controller, and (reading left to right), it's alad unit 0, on bus 0, at id 3 and lun 0.

After answering these questions, the kernel is relinked. Be sure to answer "Y" to "Rebuild the Kernel Environment", and be sure you understand what that question means (if you don't, make a copy of /etc/inittab before you begin this process). You do have to reboot before proceeding to the next step. You then run 'mkdev hd' again, and answer the same questions.

If you got it wrong:

If you guessed wrong about the controller, bus, or ID, you won't get the screens that ask about the partitions. If that's the case, don't use mkdev hd, simply go directly to /etc/conf/cf.d/mscsi, make the corrections, and link a new kernel. The controller is the first column after Sdsk, the ID is the second, then lun and bus. Simply change the appropriate column, and then relink.

If you don't feel comfortable with that, at least vi mscsi to remove the line that represents the error. Once you've got that correct, 'mkdev hd' will proceed to the second phase, where you create the Unix partition and then divide it into one or more filesystems.

During that second phase, you are asked if you want "block by block control". If you answer that affirmatively, you get to control everything about the division(s) created, including the name(s).

If you have existing data

You may want to transfer an existing disk to another system, as for an upgrade. The procedure is the same, but do NOT change the partition info, do NOT change the bad track table, and do NOT create new filesystems. You'll see your divisions; all you need to do is (n)ame them and proceed from there.

If you don't, an arbitrary (e.g. "d1150" ) name is generated. It's not actually completely arbitrary: it is related to the drive number and its id if scsi. I think it's been documented somewhere, but I never pay attention to it because:

The "finding out" can be accomplished by using 'divvy' on the appropriate device. "man HW hd" gives tables of drive names, and from that it's easy to find out /dev/hd1a will represent the second physical disk. Therefor, 'divvy -P -N /dev/hd1a' will print out info about the divisions, including the names.

Or, you can use divvy interactively, leaving out the -N and -P. By doing this, you can even change the name to something more sensible. I like to use names that are reminiscent of the mount points, so my Jaz drive has a division 'jaz', which creates a /dev/jaz, which I mount at /jaz.

Note here that the second pass of "mkdev hd" will have invoked divvy for you: you don't need these commands unless you need to get back to the divvy tables after this. Note also that if you already know the name of the division (such as /dev/u), you can get there with "divvy /dev/u"

You may want to creat multiple partitions. See Adding disk space for suggestions.

Mount

The final step, of course, is to do the mount. You can manually edit /etc/default/filesys ('man filesys'), or you can use 'mkdev fs'. This does NOTHING TO EXISTING DATA. It only creates /lost+found and adds the drive to /etc/default/filesys. You can safely use this with any drive.

For some reason, there is no mention of 'fs' in the man page for 'mkdev', but it's been in /usr/lib/mkdev for a very long time. It asks the appropriate questions, and if you give it appropriate answers, it will create the appropriate entry in /etc/default/filesys.

You didn't pay attention to the name of the division and didn't change it from the default? Look at the "Existing Data" section just above this.

You get asked for the device name. Answer that with the name of the division. You are then asked for a mount point, and finally you are asked if you want to always mount this filesystem. Generally, you'll answer yes to that.

If you told it to "always mount", you can then mount it by any of "mountall", "mount /mount_point", or by rebooting.

For ideas about what to do with this extra space see Adding disk space.

See also:

LinuxNewbie.org: Adding a Hard drive in Linux -- In five steps

 

About.com: Speed up your IDE drives

(Nov 11, 2000, 18:38 UTC) (1272 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by john)
"If you're using a recent DMA, UDMA-33 or even UDMA-66 IDE drive and motherboard and feel that under Linux, disk access seems slow compared to Windows, you may be right. In some situations, Linux doesn't automatically enable DMA for IDE hard drives."

Partitioning

phorum - Community Discussions - Best Linux Hard Drive Partition

Author: Chugunok (---.ne.mediaone.net) Date:   06-13-01 19:48

Partitionning of your HD heaviliy depends on the type of server you are building, as well on the distro you are using... For MTA you'd want your /var/spool/mail as big as you can afford, for example. For an "out-of-the-box" Web server using RH or MNDK make your /var/www partition twice the size of you estimates for the Web pages. Keep in mind that not all distros put web, FTP data directories in /var. Check with the docs of your distro. If you are using MySQL, its data directory also defaults to /var/lib/mysql, so calculate the size of the /var partition accordingly.

Here is a snapshot of one of my systems. It is an intranet server/info portal. 

 / - 500M
  /usr - 2000M
  /usr/local/ - 2000M
  /opt - 1500M
  /var/www - 20000M
  /var/lib/mysql - 5500M
  /home - 1000M
  /tmp - 1000M
  /var - 2000M
  /dos - 100M -                

It's a 2x36GB mirror. If you have any questions, let me know 

Author: Joe   Black (---.dialup.mindspring.com)
Date:   06-17-01 17:25

Will partitioning make a server more efficient per se? Maybe so. The underlying disk technology may be a big factor in performance too. RPMs, disk cache, and controllers are all important. Hardware RAID is very nice, and has less overhead than software RAID.

A few thoughts: 

  /var has to be writable and should be fairly sized.
  /usr could be read-only - mount -o remount,rw to update
  /boot 50 - 100 megs if you want a lot of kernels

  swap 2 times memory is the current recommendation for Linux
  /tmp by being separate from /, a full /tmp != full root        

Other partions as Chuquonok said may make sense.

Also, with seperate partitions, you can use different filesystem types depending on usage. reiser, XFS, ext2 all have advantages and drawbacks. Similarly mount options like "noatime" may be beneficial for a mail partition.

Things to ponder are "if this filesystem filled, what would it affect?". Similarly, "if this filesystem is oversized, how much space am I wasting?"

Dualboot

Booting Linux from the NT Boot Menu LG #61

Why an article on Linux in an NT boot menu? We have HOWTOs, don't we? The HOWTOs give step by step instructions, but unfortunately they don't provide everything we want. They are geared towards people who are new to Linux and are very good at explaining things to newbies. But when it comes to doing something out of the ordinary, we're stuck. This article is a meant to fill that void.

To start with one, day I got the crazy idea that it would be nice to have a single boot loader to boot everything from one manager instead of having both a LILO and an NT boot manager. So which manager should I choose? I chose NT boot manager because when we install LILO and boot NT from it, NT still presents its own boot menu and it's annoying enough to need to be asked two times to boot the right operating system . So I thought of removing LILO and using NT loader to present a nice menu for booting all the operating systems I have. Okay then, How do we do it? I searched through the HOWTOs. The mini HOWTO HOWTO NT OS Loader + Linux mini-HOWTO gives a good overview of the process. But unfortunately my brain couldn't grasp the concept. As a result, when I first followed the steps I got an unusable system. After 3 days of hard work and rebooting and fiddling with an unusable system 3 times, concepts began to become clear.

See also:

(Nov 11, 2000,PC Magazine: Dual Booting Getting Easier

First Steps
To make your dual-booting life easier, you should understand what it means to set up a system for multiple boot options. The main component to learn about here is the master boot record (MBR). The MBR is located in the first cylinder on the system's first hard drive, and it contains the information the operating system needs to boot. The MBR also gives the BIOS the information it needs about the hard drives in the system, including the number and size of partitions, the types of partitions (primary or logical), and which partition on the drive is bootable (also called active). Armed with this information, the BIOS looks in the MBR for the master boot code, the small program that tells it how to proceed with launching the OS. The OS then begins its start-up, and the BIOS hands control of the computer over to the OS.

Setting up a dual-boot system means installing a small program called a boot manager in the MBR. The boot manager intercepts the BIOS's search for the bootable partition and the master boot code, and then lists a set of choices on the screen. When you make your choice, the boot manager makes the selected partition bootable. It then hands control back to the BIOS, which continues the boot process as if there were only one OS.

LILO is just one boot manager available, although it is probably the one most commonly used for Windows/Linux dual-boot environments. Other operating systems, such as BeOS, offer their own boot managers. Windows NT and 2000 each provide a boot manager that appears after installing either OS on a system already containing Win 9x (as long as you don't simply replace Win 9x). In addition, several commercial or shareware boot managers are available, including BootMagic, part of the popular PartitionMagic suite from PowerQuest, Terabyte's excellent BootIt, and the venerable System Commander 2000 from V Communications.

Exploring Windows NT - Directing the boot sequence with control sets

FreeOS.com: GRUB: Multi-boot without LILO!(Feb 10, 2001, 15:00 UTC) (2474 reads) (10 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"GRUB, unlike LILO, is able to read filesystems and recognize kernel images too. While LILO requires the physical location of the kernel on your drive, GRUB does not. Even the latest filesystem ReiserFS is supported."

LinuxProgramming.com: Book Review: The Multi-Boot Configuration Handbook(Oct 21, 2000, 19:47 UTC) (30 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by lgrinzo)

"An exhaustive and nearly exhausting examination of the issues, tools, and techniques related to running more than one operating system on the same computer. If you're interesting in running any two or more of Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2, DOS, and any flavor of Windows on the same system, this book could be just the thing you need at 2AM when things so seriously wrong, or you simply can't figure out how to do something simple in a multi-OS setup. Highly recommended."

Lilo and multi-boot configurations

 I've been using Linux casually for the last couple of years and several months ago I installed RedHat 4.0 on the second IDE drive of a Win95 system. Though I've used System Commander in the past I don't like using it with Win95 so I had the RedHat install process create a boot floppy. This has always worked fine, and I made a second backup floppy using dd) which I also made sure booted fine.

This probably isn't really a "boot" floppy. It sounds like a "lilo" floppy to me. The difference is that a boot floppy has a kernel on it -- a "lilo" floppy just has the loader on it.

The confusing thing about Linux is that it can be booted in so many ways. In a "normal" configuration you have Lilo as the master boot program (on the first hard drive -- in the first sector of track 0 -- with the partition table). Another common configuration places lilo in the "superblock" (logical boot record) of the Linux "root" partition (allowing the DOS boot block, or the OS/2 or NT boot manager -- or some third party package like System Commander) to process the partition table and select the "active" partition -- which *might* be the Linux root partition.

Less common ways of loading Linux: use LOADLIN.EXE (or SYSLINUX.EXE) -- which are DOS programs that can load a Linux kernel (kicking DOS out from under them so to speak), put Lilo on a floppy (which is otherwise blank) -- or on a none Linux boot block (which sounds like your situation).

Two others: You can put Lilo on a floppy *with* a Linux kernel -- or you can even write a Linux kernel to a floppy with no lilo. That last option is rarely used.

The point of confusion is this: LILO loads the Linux kernel using BIOS calls. It offers one the opportunity to pass parameters to the kernel (compiled into it's boot image via the "append" directive in /etc/lilo.conf -- or entered manually at boot time at the lilo prompt).

Another source of confusion is the concept that LILO is a block of code and data that's written to a point that's outside the filesystems on a drive -- /sbin/lilo is a program that writes this block of boot code according to a set of directives in the /etc/lilo.conf. It's best to think of the program /sbin/lilo as a "compiler" that "compiles" a set of boot images according to the lilo.conf and writes them to some place outside of your filesystem.

Yet another source of confusion is that the Linux kernel has a number of default parameters compiled into it. These can be changed using the 'rdev' command (which was originally used to set the "root device" flags in a kernel image file). 'rdev' basically patches values into a file. It can be be used to set the "root device," the "initial video mode" and a number of other things. Some of these settings can be over-ridden via the LILO prompt and append lines. LOADLIN.EXE can also pass parameters to the kernel that it loads.

There's a big difference between using a kernel image written directly on a floppy -- and a LILO that's built to load an image that's located on a floppy filesystem (probably minix or ext2fs). With LILO the kernel must be located on some device that is accessible with straight BIOS calls.

This usually prevents one from using LILO to boot off of a third IDE or SCSI disk drive (since most systems require a software driver to allow DOS or other OS' to "see" these devices). I say "usually" because there are some BIOS' and especially some BIOS extensions on some SCSI and EIDE controllers that may allow LILO to access devices other than the first two floppies and the first two hard drives. However, those are rare. Most PC hardware can only "see" two floppy drives and two hard drives -- which must be on the same controller -- until an OS loads some sort of drivers.

In the case where a kernel is directly located on the raw floppy -- and in the case where the kernel is located on the floppy with LILO -- the kernel has the driver code for your root device (and controllers) built in. (There are also complex new options using 'initrd' -- an "initial RAM disk" which allows a modular kernel to load the drivers for it's root devices.

Yet another thing that's confusing to the DOS user -- and most transplants from other forms of Unix -- is that the kernel doesn't have to be located on the root device. In fact LOADLIN.EXE requires that the kernel be located on a DOS filesystem.

To make matters more complicated you can have multiple kernels on any filesystem, any of them might use any filesystem as their root device and these relationships (between kernel and root device/filesystem can be set in several ways -- i.e. by 'rdev' or at compile time, vs. via the LOADLIN or LILO command lines).

I recommend that serious Linux users reserve a small (20 or 30 Mb) partition with just a minimal installation of the root/base Linux software on it. This should be on a separate device from your main Linux filesystems.

Using this you have an alternative (hard drive based) boot method which is much faster and more convenient than digging out the installation boot/root floppies (or having to go to a working machine and build a new set!). I recommend the same thing for most Solaris and FreeBSD installations. If you have a DOS filesystem on the box -- at least stash a copy of LOADLIN.EXE and a few copies of your favorite kernels in C:\LINUX\ (or wherever).

Now that more PC SCSI cards support booting off of CD-ROM's (a feature that's been long overdue!) you can get by without heeding my advice -- IF YOU HAVE SUCH A CONTROLLER AND A CD TO MATCH.

(Incidentally -- I found out quite by accident that the Red Hat 4.1 CD is "bootable" on Adaptec 2940 controllers -- if you have the Adaptec configured to allow it. I've also heard that the NCR SymBIOS PCI controller supports this -- though I haven't tested that yet).

In any event we should all make "rescue disks" -- unfortunately these are trickier than they should be. Look for the Bootdisk HOWTO for real details about this.

About a week ago I put the Linux floppy in the diskette drive, reset the machine and waited for the LILO prompt. Everything went fine, but all I got were the letters LI and everything stopped. I have tried several times, using the original and the backup diskette, with the same results.

 Did you add a new drive to the system?

 I have done nothing (that I can think of!) to my machine and I'm at a loss as to what might be causing this. Just to ensure that the floppy drive wasn't acting funny, I've booted DOS from it and that went fine.

 When you booted DOS where you able to see the drive? I'd get out your installation floppy (or floppies -- I don't remember whether Red Hat 4.0 had a single floppy system or not -- 4.1 and 4.2 only require one for most hardware). Boot from that and choose "rescue" or switch out of the installation script to a shell prompt. You should then be able to attempt mounting your root filesystem.

If that fails you can try to 'fsck' it. After that it's probably a matter of reinstallation and restoring from backups.

 Any ideas you have would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

Dave Runnels

 Glad I could help.

Emergency Boot Floppies

Emergency boot floppies

It is not always possible to boot a computer from the hard disk. For example, if you make a mistake in configuring LILO, you might make your system unbootable. For these situations, you need an alternative way of booting that will always work (as long as the hardware works). For typical PC's, this means booting from the floppy drive.

Most Linux distributions allow one to create an emergency boot floppy during installation. It is a good idea to do this. However, some such boot disks contain only the kernel, and assume you will be using the programs on the distribution's installation disks to fix whatever problem you have. Sometimes those programs aren't enough; for example, you might have to restore some files from backups made with software not on the installation disks.

Thus, it might be necessary to create a custom root floppy as well. The Bootdisk HOWTO by Graham Chapman (XXX citation) contains instructions for doing this. You must, of course, remember to keep your emergency boot and root floppies up to date.

You can't use the floppy drive you use to mount the root floppy for anything else. This can be inconvenient if you only have one floppy drive. However, if you have enough memory, you can configure your boot floppy to load the root disk to a ramdisk (the boot floppy's kernel needs to be specially configured for this). Once the root floppy has been loaded into the ramdisk, the floppy drive is free to mount other disks.

TechRepublic: When Linux panics: Managing an OS emergency(Apr 27, 2000, 23:53 UTC) (Posted by john) (1 talkback posted) (1786 reads)

"Yes, even with a workhorse like Linux, a user can suffer from the ultimate misfortune of a system failure or file-system crash. ...I'll explain how you can create a boot floppy (post-install) and use fsck, and I'll list the files and directories that you should back up in case your Linux computer ever goes down..."

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