General Install Procedure
This document covers the basic setup and procedure I go through to install Sourcemage on my computers.
First the partitioning of the drive. I partition my drive into four partitions: # Root1 - the root partition for installation 1 (~5-10GB) # Root2 - the root partition for installation 2 (~5-10GB) # Home - the /home partition which is shared by both Root1 and Root2 # Swap - the swap partition (~1GB)
The advantages of having two root partitions:
- One can be for general day-to-day work, i.e., you don't risk changing things too much that you render your computer useless, and the other is for playtime, i.e., where you can try new things, like a new kernel configuration, and not worry about breaking things.
- If you break one partition then you can boot into the other to fix the broken one.
- I also use one partition to make an image tarball of the other. When I start a new installation I usually make an image at four stages through the installation:
- # Just after installing and you've rebuilt the system
- # Just after building xfree86 or xorg
- # Just after building gnome, kde, xfce or enlightenment
- # Just after building any extra tools you might often use
These images are saved on the /home partition. So anytime I want to have a fresh install I just wipe the partition I want the fresh install on, mount the partition and untar the image of my choice onto the partition. I then reboot and rebuild the partition. I usually take an image of the new partition for future use.
This setup, I find, makes it easy to install Sourcemage and play with it with quick recovery if something goes wrong. This is especially good if you are new to Linux and want to learn more.
The other trick I play is I put my Sourcemage codex and spool on the home partition, then I can mount /home on both root partitions and create symlinks to the codex and spool. This means you don't have to download and save two copies of your codex and source files.
Installing from CD
I will fill this in next time I do an installation from CD.
Restart from Image Tarball
This section covers how I restart from a image tarball I made earlier. I will install the image on the root partition 1 (hda1).
1. Boot into root partition 2 (hda2)
2. Create the filesystem on Root Partition 1: Here you can use your favorite filesystem. I like xfs.
3. Make a directory to mount Root Partition 1:
4. Mount Root Partition 1:
5. Go into /mnt/smgl1
6. Untar your image file onto Root Partition 1:
7. Ensure grub is setup to boot the kernel from the image.