The Open Sourcerer

Build your own PC Part III

Although somewhat belatedly, here is a brief discussion on what has happened since I finished building Lobsang.

The system has been very stable and reliable. It is quiet. And it performs well.  There have been a couple of niggles with the software installation that I would like to mention and also briefly I wanted to cover partitioning as a reader requested it.

Software

As with most of my computers I installed Ubuntu Linux on this one. Due to some kind of incompatibility with the BIOS and my shiny new graphics card, I ended up installing the pre-release (Alpha 5) of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, the 8.10 version. It’s been very stable throughout the time I have been using it but the graphics card has been problematic.

Initially I had quite a few difficulties using this new NVIDIA 9500GT card which made me simply drop back to using the default and OSS “nv” driver instead. That was fine as I needed the machine for work so I was quite happy to wait for eye-candy support. When 8.10 was actually released I re-enabled the NVIDIA binary drivers for my hardware. Initially it seemed OK and worked but I was limited to a maximum resolution 768×1024. My monitor can handle quite a bit more than that.

It turns out that one of the big changes in 8.10 is with Xorg. The configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf is basically empty and everything is auto-configured. This is fine as long as the detection process works. My monitor is connected to the VGA port of the graphics card, via a Belkin KVM switch. I think this is preventing the monitor from being detected and hence I am left with a minimal option for configuring my monitor.

Using the nvidia-settings application allows me to change the screen resolution to something more sensible but the changes I make are not persistent, even when I have run it as root. I have tried to “hard-code” the relevant settings in my xorg.conf but on each reboot the monitor has defaulted back to the standard 1024×768 resolution. It is a tad annoying, but hopefully there will be a fix shortly – or if I get a new shiny TFT for Christmas the problem will probably go away anyway.

Partitioning

Here is the partition table I am using on Lobsang:

As you can see I have split my disk into 6 partitions.

• sda1 is a small boot partition so that I can have multiple OS’s kernels and a common grub to load them all (Linux distributions, not that “other” legacy operating system.) in one location.
• sda5, sda6 and sda7 are each 15GB partitions that I have for the operating system’s / file system. I could have, for example, Ubuntu 8.10 on sda5, Kubuntu on sda6 and Fedora on sda7. 15GB should be more than ample for most installations. My current Intrepid installation – with lots of space hungry apps installed – is only using 4GB.
• sda8 is my /home partition. All 270GB can be used (shared) by any of the OSs and it also makes re-installing an OS a breeze as all my settings and data are stored on a separate and OS independent partition*.
• sda9 is the swap partition. Typically it is made to be about twice the size of the available RAM. I recall reading somewhere quite some time ago that it is advantageous to have it at the “end” of the disk although I can’t recall why. Maybe it is at the fastest part of the disk or something…

Also note I am using the XFS filesystem for the home partition. There are two reasons for this. The first is it has better performance for very large files, like all those ISOs I keep downloading and virtual machine images etc. And also it is more efficient space wise. I probably gained about 4-5GB of space over the more traditional ext3 filesystem on a disk this size.

* Adrian over at Mercian Labels posed a question about this very subject on his blog recently. I suggested using a separate partition for /home for these very reasons.