Michael's ArchLinux Installation

[trev.saunders at gmail.com]

Hi,

> Thanks for the information. I did sort of know about the suspend to disk 
> advantage.

I'm not sure it might have been tuxonice, but I feel like I remember that s2disk could use a swap file.

> 
> I do have a question. As my reason for using swap files for swap space 
> is to do with having 2GB of RAM and so using the RAM times two rule for 
> swap means 4GB which is more than I think my laptop's HD wants to take 
> permanently (I mean it would restrict the other partitions more than I 
> would want to go).

I think this real is a bit outdated, fro m a point where paging out to disk was common.  I have a laptop with 2G of ram too, I've never had more than 1G of swap.  On that machine, with few acceptions, I see very little swapping to disk and usually large amounts of free ram, which meanbs swap is basically just for s2disk, and with compression, 1G seems to be enough.

> Now I have heard people mention about LVM allowing 
> more dynamic allocation of disk space, how possible are the following 
> and how safe are they:
> 
> * To expand and shrink volumes with data on (eg. an ext4 partition 
> holding the main system)?

this is certainly doable, in some cases you can do it on line (the filesystem is mounted while you expand it).  Personally I would do it off line with a livecd if neccessary.  Increasing or decreasing the size of a logical volume is very easy, you then have to grow the filesystem afterwards or shrink it first.

> * Suspend to disk, does it work if swap is a volume in LVM?

I'm going to try this soon, I don't see any reason why not but that doesn't mean it'll work.

> * Is there any issues with using swap in a volume?

Same, I don't see any, but I'l  try it in the next week or so and know better.

> * What is the options for installing grub when using LVM? Remember my 
> preference has been to install it to the partition boot sector.

 well, logical volumes (like partitions) live in a volume group, which is a set of physical volumes who's space has been put in 1 pooll.  You can certainly install grub on any of the partitions involved.  You need to have atleast 2 partiotions total, they could be different drives.  This is because /boot can't be on lvm, but root can be.  So assuming you want to put everything but /boot on lvm, you could certainly install grub on the partition that is /boot.  Note that if you put root on lvm, your initrd will need to setup lvm and mount root, personally I make my own initrd's for this, its not hard, but I think somedistros (debian and gentoo come to mind) have tools to do this.

HTH
Trev