Question about installing Fedora 11

[Wackjob]

I am new to Linux, and my knowledge for setting up partitions is limited.

Anyhow, in the installation menu I tried using the setting "Use the entire disk" to install Fedora 11 on my hard drive. Whenever I choose that option the installer runs for a little bit and then stops, reports an error and reboots my system.

I have tried setting custom partitions and the installer works, but I do not know if I setup my partitions correctly. I deleted the LVM stuff and I used these partitions...

/boot (Ext3 500 mb)
swap (3000 mb)
/ (Ext4 rest of free space)

Do I need any other partitions? Do I need to adjust the size of the partitions? Also, what is the LVM and do I need it?

Lastly, and maybe more importantly, is Fedora usable by Linux novices? I should probably ask that before I go to the trouble of fully installing it.

[stefan1975]

well if you are that green behind the ears (as we all were at one point) you might not want to choose fedora as your first linux but rather try ubuntu or even mint (improved ubuntu) since fedora is (well was actually) more geared towards technical improvements and less the novice end-user.

Least of all when you are not sure what you are doing, choosing a beta release of fedora really isn't a very smart thing to do imho, since F11 isn't released yet. especially anaconda, the fedora installer has seen some changes that may be causing these problems. your manual setup seems about fine from what I can see from your post, just without lvm. /boot could be smaller even but if you have tons of space it won't hurt you either and swap usually is 1 or 1.5 times memory.

lvm is logical volume manager, it means you have a software layer between your disk and the os making it more easy to add / resize disks. I personally think that if you have a one disk system (laptop) where you might not add a second volume to which you want to add to the same filesystems LVM is not neccesary.

LVM (Logical Volume Management) partitions provide a number of advantages over standard partitions. LVM partitions are formatted as physical volumes. One or more physical volumes are combined to form a volume group. Each volume group's total storage is then divided into one or more logical volumes. The logical volumes function much like standard data partitions. They have a file system type, such as ext3, and a mount point.

An administrator may grow or shrink logical volumes without destroying data, unlike standard disk partitions. If the physical volumes in a volume group are on separate drives then administrators may also spread a logical volume across multiple disks and RAID arrays.

depending on your needs everything you want to do can be done in linux as well, maybe apart from photoshop, banking software and 3d gaming.