Ello, I'm sort of new to the lists...is it best to install from livecd?

[Chris Tyler]

On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 01:01 +0930, Tim wrote:
> I'm curious as to why installing from a live disc should be any better.
> Surely it'd use the same basic routines.

The install from live disc basically consists of copying the ext3
filesystem to disk and then resizing it after the copy -- which is why
it's so fast, and also why you can't select which packages will be
installed.


> > The default partitioner is a bad feature of Fedora,
> > and must have caused many problems.
> 
> It's worked pretty well on everything that I've tried it on, I can't say
> that I like the defaults (small boot, one / partition, one swap
> partition), but the defaults are fine for many people, and the tool's
> not too bad.  I've certainly seen worse, and it's easier than doing
> maths in your head, or on paper, to work out your partition sizing with
> fdisk (planning what sizes you want for each).  The one feature I'd
> really like to add is for you to be able to type in the disc labels that
> you want it to use, free-form.

Seems there are a few common partitioning patterns. Maybe instead of a
single default, Anaconda should offer a few of the more common patterns
on a menu: "LVM with separate /home", "LVM with separate /home
and /var", "Non-LVM/Direct partitions"

OTOH, I can't see why you'd avoid LVM these days in most configurations.
It's very stable, adds only very tiny overhead, and yet gives you a lot
more flexibility for the future (disk migration, volume resizing, adding
disks to existing filesystems, ...). It's saved my bacon numerous times.

-Chris