Not happy with 'use the free space and creat default partions' during installation

[manishgarg21]

Hi,

I have recently installed Fedora 8, i386 on my Acer Aspire 5500 Laptop, Pentium M. I was orinaly using windows o this machine. Change partitions using QTparted (Knoppix). I made disk space free for Linux installation (around 8Gb). And during installation process i used the option "use the free space and creat default partions" for creaing the partitions. Rather then showing /dev/hda6 (because my windows last partition was hda5) it is showing /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 in my /etc/fstab file. however /boot is mount on/dev/sda6. What is this /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 ? why such a name. Also installer has given 2GB of space to swap. For my work i dont need any swap space. How i can change that to my root disk space.
Thank in advance.

Manish

[marko]

You got burned by the default LVM installation setup by the installer.

Fedora 8 (unfortunately) defaults to installing the partitions to use
a Logical Volume Manager (LVM). I always do the custom install of partitions
option and
pick to review the partitioning and setup my own partitions. Only when
you do this step are the LVM's obvious (they showup on the display
of the disks and partitions showing what the installer is planning to do).
I then delete the LVMs and make normal ext3 partitions out of the free space.
This is the only way I know to avoid LVM usage.

Unfortunately I think the only way to get normal non-lvm setup is to
reinstall from scratch and like I was staying, do custom partitioning
and delete the LVMs that Fedora's anaconda tries to make for you.

[manishgarg21]

sorry, i really could not understand what you mean by "Only when you do this step are the LVM's obvious (they showup on the display of the disks and partitions showing what the installer is planning to do). I then delete the LVMs and make normal ext3 partitions out of the free space.
This is the only way I know to avoid LVM usage."

Suppose i do the installation from the scratch, and i use custom partition, and i dont need any swap space, then if i use 200 MB for the boot, can i use rest of the space for root? Whether i will be able to use rest of the space for my folder below the root (/) folder? Sorry if my questions are too primitive, i am new to linux.

Thanks.

[marko]

Ok I guess I didn't use perfect language there, I'm just saying that when I do a
Fedora install I don't use the default partitioning setup selection but rather pick the
"custom" option. Only if you do that will be offered the option to not use
LVM for the disk. Also if you use the custom partitioning it will not pick that
large swap partition for you, it will only make a swap partition if you set one up.

If you use the default selection, the installer looks at the amount of RAM
in your PC and creates a swap partition scaled to that size of RAM and
it also uses a logical volume manager for the disk which is why you
had those odd volume names.

As to your second question, yes, if you install from scratch you can do whatever
you want, 200MB /boot and the rest to / will work fine. All directories
not explicitly given a mount point go under "/"

[manishgarg21]

Thanks for the reply.
Again i have doubt regarding "All directories not explicitly given a mount point go under "/"". Can you please explain this. Do you mean that i have to mount it manually. Otherwise it will not work by it self.

[scottro]

When you choose custom layout, you're taken to a screen showing what is there. Delete the logical volumes. Choose new for the boot and make it whatever size you want.
Then click new again, choose the remaining space and choose / as the mount point. There should be an option to fill up the free space.

It looks as if the official guides can't imagine someone not wanting to use LVMs, but I didn't look at them too closely.