Installation report

Yes, the XP installation does not have the drivers for the newest hardware. Even with SP2 slipstreamed, it's many months behind. Ubuntu Breezy Badger came out Oct 12th, and does have support for the new hardware. Duh. I also disagree with the author's belief that a drive with only one partition on it is "unusable". I don't think he knows what the word "unusable" means.

I do agree with the author about the hardware. The Optiplex GX620 is an excellent corporate workstation. I have one at my desk; it is the newest generation of Dell's corporate workstation design and it is very well thought out. Their 18mo hardware stability promise is nice too (the specs won't change for a while allowing you to keep your Windows image for a long time). And obviously, it runs multiple operating systems very well.

From a Linux point of view this is true. You need at least swap and root and if you're going to take control properly you also need at least one more partition for /home. A single drive with one partition is next to useless to a Linux user unless it's a second drive.

Thanks, Sal - I couldn't have said it better. Sorry for my bad english btw...

huh?

I don't have swap and I have one partition. just one. :)

Linux and everything else works just fine.

Multi partitions is an admin/info management choice, not a necessity......

Bryan

What do you do when you upgrade to a newer version or even a different distribution. I have a dual boot on my laptop where I could only fit / and swap, because Win2K took 2 partitions itself. Do you store /home on external media or a different machine?

Hmmm ok - if you wanna upgrade Windows (or reinstall), you'll have to deal with Grub afterwards to get your dual-boot-capabilities back (because Windows will overwrite your MBR; it's a bit of a Highlander behaviour ("There can only be one")).

I don't use Windows since years. I never had a paid copy anyway, plus Linux is so much better, so why even bother?

And yes, of course we have copies of our /home directories on DVD as well as on other machines, where we rsync to backup them. But if I wanna cleansweep my distribution, I simply set up another without destroying the /home. If you have the same User IDs afterwards, this works perfectly.

There is no such thing as to separate programs and data. Ye olde Unix admins learned that in school (means, in high school or universities)... ;-) And the funny things is: this even works for Windoze installations. Even if Redmond doesn't know that...

There are a number of reasons for multiple volumes. In addition to isolating system and data files, and, the ease of upgrading on Linux, the smaller volumes do mean faster access. While Disks have grown faster, and the OS's deal better with larger volumes, there is still a strong case for the multiple volume concept, and in Linux, a minimum of system, home, and, swap. I wouldn't suggest you leave out swap unless you have a Gig or more of ram. Few people will need swap very often if they do have a Gig, but, your results may vary.

(Sorry Sal, that should read correctly now...)

Think you might mean Gig there jimf.

Imagine you have your linux system installed on one partition. You attempt to install some software and trash the system, what do you do? Suppose you don't have a live CD distro/cd-writer to hand. How do you recover your files before re-installing? If Home has it's own partition then you just reinstall the system and when you boot back in your home folder/desktop are exactly as you left them. Obviously, if you trashed your home area then reinstalling the base system won't help at all. So if you can't login or things are going wrong, try and log in as root and create a new user and log in as that new user to see if it's a system wide problem or just a home folder problem.

It's best practice to have more than one partition.

Right. Except of course if you have your /home on a separate disk, like I have it at work. Or better even: two separate disks running a RAID-1. ;-)