On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Tom Poe <tompoe at meltel.net> wrote: > Ryan Coleman wrote: >> Best... response... ever... >> > My apologies, folks. Sent the wrong message. Found out the tribes sell > retail price, and pocket the federal taxes in a deal with the > state/feds. The message I wanted to send: > > Well, made the move from northeast Iowa. Now in striking range for > install fests, etc. All settled in Eden Valley. Need to set up my Dell > GX260 desktop to maximize my standalone DSL line with Internet access > provided by regional telecom, Melrose Telephone Company. Can someone > point me to a set of linux commands to document what my computer is, > now? I want to check hardware setup. I have two drives, an 80GB drive > and a 160GB drive, but want to upgrade to Ubuntu10.4 and use both > drives. In other words, want to reformat both drives, and treat as > one. Any suggestions appreciated. > Tom > If you want to treat both drives as one, you need to use LVM. It's not available trough the normal desktop ubuntu live disk, you will need the alternative installer cd to make such an installation. Using LVM, you first need to make PVs (phisical volumes), then create LG (logical group) and add them to it. LG will look like as a single device to your system. After that in the LG you create - LVs (logical volumes) - think about them as partitions in the LG device. There are few bad things with this approach - if one of the disks fail, you loose everything - but again, this will happen as well as if you have only one disk and it fails :) I would suggest that you partition your first drive as follows: 200-300 MB /boot - etc3 (you don't need etx4 for that, even etc2 will be enough) about 10G for the / - to hold your OS another 10G (optional) just to have free space for another OS, if you decide to do so later to try out something about 1G swap (depends on your memory, but 1G should be more than enough). The rest of the drive you can partition as 20G chucks. Same for the second drive - many 20GB chunks. Make these 20G partitions a PVs for your LVM setup. Create LG out of few of them (not all - you can add later when you need more space). In the LG, create 2 partitions (LVs) to hold your /home and /var - IMHO these are the once which usually need more space. Every time you need more space, you can add more PVs to the LG, and then resize the LVs on the new empty space. That way you would not block all of your available space at once, but on "as needed" basis. You can always re-use the not used empty PVs for something else if you need to. Just don't forget to backup :) And remember - its not enough to resize the LV (partition), you need to resize the file system on that partition as well. I.e. if you expand the /home LV, you will need to resize the files system as well. Here are 2 links for more details: http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-over-lvm-filesystem Also, here is an explanation how to instal nice GUI to manage your LVM setup, when you need to expand: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=216117 Cheers, Sunny -- Svetoslav Milenov (Sunny) Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.