Fedora gets new partition manager Fedora developer Vratislav Podzimek wants partition managers to catch up with modern storage technologies, and has launched his offering, blivet-gui, on the waiting world. The tool is designed to act as a front-end for Fedora's Anaconda. Available at copr here, the partition manager is “still in early development stage”, with …
ANOTHER partitioning tool?! really? You may not like MS but they wrote notepad and diskpart and moved on to better things. They wrote their partitioning tool to be extensible and so as new disk technologies appeared they just added bits.
Seriously kids, there are a million and one things missing or poorly coded in Linux which deserve some attention. Here is a small sample list of things we don't need more of:
-Skinning tools
-Skins
-text editors
-installers
-partitioning tools
-Window managers
-Packaging tools and formats
Here is a smaller list of things we could use a bunch of:
-Quality software
-Standardised management and automation tools for compliance and centralised administration
WIndows DIsk Management may look easy, but its underying support for raid and volume management are /awful/.
NONE of the existing mainstream linux partition managers are 'good enough'. fdisk and most of its ilk can't handle devices over 2GB due to the limitations of MBR. parted can, but its UI and functionality is *awful*. gparted is just a gui over parted, and has a lot of problems caused by the underpinnings.
really, storage management as a whole under linux is awful. mdraid capabilities should be folded into LVM, so you don't have to deal with all these different layers. look at the way IBM does LVM+JFS in AIX for a big clue.
NONE of the existing mainstream linux partition managers are 'good enough'. fdisk and most of its ilk can't handle devices over 2GB due to the limitations of MBR.
Are you sure you mean Linux and not Windows here? The Linux fdisk utility is perfectly capable of handling bigger partitions than 2GB: I just ran it up to check. I usually use cfdisk because I prefer its user interface.
How about 6TB (2 £TB disks) as 1 virtual disk with XFS on top.
I could only find a command line solution (complete with errors :( ),
so it became a suck it & see.
Why did I need all that disk space - for a new MythTV box I built, because the old one (with 2TB) ran out of space so often, I became utterly fed up up with trying to work out what I could delete next.
M0ar 4m4t! This ash stick isn't formatted with zfs, shall we get a go on? [OpenGL fireworks] Yeah!
Did you want 90 50GB volumes with 7GB swap on this SSD and SATA3(HW, SATA 3-drive failsafe) set? Done, picked JFS like this...change away...twongle SElinux and backup settings, lather and rinse protocols, plant User Mode Linux here and there...console sparkles affirmingly.
Why all the scratching around for a new partition manager when Diskdrake has been about for years?
I've never understood why it has been confined to Mandrake derived distros like Mageia and PCLinuxOS. Its GUI, very easy to use and does the job in a fraction of the time it takes with other managers.
After all NetworkManager is GUI, is easy to use and just works, it got where it is by merit so the Darwinian principle worked there.
Why Diskdrake isn't the same is one of the great unsolved mysteries as far as I'm concerned.
over 2t partions without setting up your own partion/fat/whatever?
I'm in. will it sterilze IBG's and derfag too?
plus I tend to drown in data here and can't find what I need. (rots o ruck with THAT one)
on the plus side, I'm still telling people xp/98 etc is about to fail because their smallish drives are nosey and about to go blooey. (surprising how many of them don't have backups when they do go. You can't help these people.)
packrat
The opensuse YAST manager seems to handle many cases, especially for when you have blank disks.
But, and I think we all agree, partition management if it is required after an OS is installed if for the *adults* to handle.
Hence, sfdisk to save the table, and cfdisk to manipulate. And Gpart as a last resort if you mess it all up....!
P.
Suse is my favourite distro, but I seem to think I've run into problems with it not always playing nice with GPT in its partitioning gui - some bits are ok and others just tell you its GPT and give no further information. I don't have anything larger than 2TB though, so I can't confirm, plus my server-side is still running 12.x
I am tired of cleaning up Linux boxes that have crashed because the disks fill up due to /etc, /home, /opt, and /tmp being on the same damn partition. I've had to clean up numerous servers that have refused to boot under their own power because some application lost its mind and started cramming endless streams of stuff into /opt/application and now the kernel can't write to /var/log. OR the countless desktops that the users filled /home and now most of their applications won't even bother starting up.
What distro is that?
/tmp normally defaults to swap and at least on suse, it defaults to a separate home partition.
In my experience, /var/log is going to fill things up long before /opt/application does, unless someone thought a small system disk should include apps.
I generally find 50G for apps and logs is plenty. The sneaky one is mysql which doesn't default to storing data under /home/x
See you've made my point.
Diskdrake handles things like separate partitions with ease. It's just a case of working out what space is needed for each partiiton and than using the GUI to split up the disc. Its easy because you have a graphic representation of what the partitions are and you can manipulate them to your hearts content.
Personally I have separate partitions for /, boot, usr, var, opt, and tmp. I prefer to use a second HDD for /home so that when I re-install the OS I don't have to worry about deleting any of my data. I could of course just have another partition on the first drive but with two I don't have to worry about fat-finger syndrome.
I remember installing Redhat 4 many moons ago and it suggested the following as different partitions:
/
/boot
/usr
/var
/home
/usr/local
swap partition
The problem is that newer 'user friendly' distros (ubuntu and derivitives I'm looking at you) seem to default to having the whole tree under one or two partitions to cater for the Linux virgins who need things done the easy way:
/
/home (possibly)
swap partition
Because that's how Windows pretty much installs - one partition, click, click, click, copying files.
Of course the option is there for it to be done properly, if one so desires. Full-fat Debian I think lets you do it the way Dog intended.
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