[ltp] Setting up dual-boot on my R31 (and other desktops, too)

[Matt Graham]

On Friday 28 July 2006 13:48, after a long battle with technology, 
thinkpadr31@lkv.mailshell.com wrote:
> I'm thinking of setting up my Thinkpad R31 with Windows and Linux.  
> I have 1 GB of RAM.   I'll likely set up Linux first and then Windows
> at a later date.

The general rule about OSes is "install the stupidest OS first".  
Often, 'Doze replaces the existing MBR with its own, so you have to 
reinstall GRUB or LILO from a rescue system or LiveCD after 
installing 'Doze.

> I'm leaning towards Ubuntu but curious about Gentoo.

Gentoo's awesome, but it's not really for the novice.  The docs 
available on gentoo.org spell everything you need to do to install 
Gentoo out in detail.  Read those; if they scare you, use a different 
distro.  If not, full speed ahead!

> I'm not sure if I have to use the ext2 file system.  Any other
> situations where I can't or shouldn't use a journaling file system
> like ext3, reiserfs, or xfs?

There's no real reason to use ext2 these days.  ext3 works fine, but 
ReiserFS may be less useful on a laptop because IIRC, Reiser's code 
bypasses the delayed-write mechanisms that you want to use with 
noflushd and/or laptop-mode.  Maybe they've fixed that now.  XFS is a 
good filesystem, but the code required to read and write it is very 
large, so many of the smaller rescue systems don't have XFS support.

> If I implemented this setup on a *desktop*, will I get better
> performance if I put my swap partition on a second physical drive?

If you're hitting swap at all, you don't have enough RAM.  Lessee... 
currently, I'm using 628K swap on my T42p, and 328K swap on my desktop.  
There's little to be gained by having a separate swap drive unless 
you're working with insanely huge data sets and hitting swap more than 
you should.  Hell, I have /swapfile on my desktop instead of a 
dedicated swap partition....

> I'm thinking of putting a bunch of older 3-8 GB 3.5" drives to use.

The older the disk, the slower it is (for obvious reasons).  HTH,

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