Re: My experiences with partitioning according to the manual

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> skribis:

> I'm not sure if it's worth, updating the manual, since the graphical
> installer may be here soon. But I want to share my experience to show
> that we strongly need the graphical installer :-)

That makes sense.  :-)  Thanks for sharing!

>   *
>
>     The first example is of a partitioning program is "cfdisk". I do non
>     know this program, tried it and failed terrible. cfdisk seems to
>     expect some script (huh?) to execute.

“cfdisk” (without any arguments) pops up an ncurses interface that’s
reasonably easy to use, at least for someone already familiar with
partitioning.

What makes you think that it expects a script?

>   *
>
>     The first step in the instructions should be to (optionally)
>     initialize the partition table (for the case this is a fresh disk).
>
>       o
>
>         Should this a GPT partition table?
>
>       o Which commands to issue?
>       o        parted mklabel gpt

There’s probably room for improvement, though we chose to not
(re)document everything about partitioning—it’s something that belongs
elsewhere IMO.

In fact, I tried to revive the “GNU Storage Guide”, which exists at
<https://alioth.debian.org/projects/storage-guide>, but the Debian folks
never managed to grant me access to this thing (!).  See also
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-06/msg00127.html>.

At this point we might be better off starting anew…

>   *
>
>     How to align the first partition (with parted)?

I don’t remember having to worry about this.  Did you have troubles?

>   *
>
>     How big should the boot partition be? Mine seems to have been too
>     small, so I got warnings when formatting as FAT32.

I think the recommendation is to have 50+ MiB for /boot/efi.  Marius,
could you confirm?  We should definitely write it down.

>   * FMPOV for the users it would be easier to have a list of commands to
>     issue, like this:
>
> # parted /dev/sda
> mkpart primary fat32 1024s 20MB
> mkpart primary ext2 20MB 100%
> set 1 esp on
> name 1 boot
> name 2 my-root
> quit
>
> # mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
> # mkfs.ext4 -L my-root /dev/sda2

We don’t have the Parted commands because the manual suggests cfdisk.

I’ve added the ‘mkfs.fat’ command.

Thank you!

Ludo’.