I will do a completely new setup of my system and need to have a few questions answered.
The setup will be /boot and then LVM encrypted. HOWEVER, I need space to be partitioned for another OS.
Now my questions: the install
guide about LVM is not very clear when it comes to sizing and to the position of the partition.
Quote:
If you run the expert dialog during installation, any free hard disk space is also listed and automatically selected. To provide more disk space to openSUSE®, free the needed space starting from the bottom toward the top of the list (starting from the last partition of a hard disk toward the first). For example, if you have three partitions, you cannot use the second exclusively for openSUSE and retain the third and first for other operating systems.
All cases are described in which openSUSE is the second OS to be installed. This is not my case. I wish opensSUSE to be installed as the first OS and to maintain available space to install and may change from time to time another OS or in which to experiment maybe the Factory version, just to do an example.
- when the installer makes the proposal of the LVM it attributes the entire disk. How can I avoid this? IF I did well understand the guide, openSUSE must be together with /boot on the last partitions of the disk? So do I have to define another partition and format it with whatever, in order to have the installer taking the rest and simply performing the standard setup proposal?
- if I leave this space not formatted (or formatted) and at a time I install the new OS, will Grub in /boot still be available (we speak e.g. of another Linux distribution or of a beta of openSUSE) after the installation of another OS into this partition? If not, how could I reactivate it?
- where should I install the bootloader when installing with this intention (please motivate your advice and be explicit about the consequences of this choice, my understanding is currently that it is better to avoid MBR and to use /boot. Is this correct? The root partition is encrypted and therefore not applicable AFAIK. Again all this is with the thought of having a kind of playground allowing for the installation of one supplemental OS for testing / didactic purposes without virtualizing the thing. Virtualization made me not really happy, KVM is quite complicated to setup and virtualbox is also no option to me. So I am looking for a hardware solution.
- is this feasible at all or maybe this is not possible any more or never was in this configuration? Maybe it is known to cause too many problems?
- Can I use trusted grub instead of Grub2 at install time? (Grub2 I do not see it to give me any advantage if I am using no UEFI bios). I am asking that because when I tried to install grub in substitution of grub2, in the old configuration I had, it failed and although yast indicated grub legacy installed, grub 2 continued to be present, could not be uninstalled and continued to be the default bootloader (one of the reasons why I try the new install - together with the space problem). Symptoms where that when installing it stopped at 100% of install and blocked yast.
- Size of swap. I do not understand what is the right amount of swap. The system has 8GB of RAM. Now people say that 2 GB is enough and the automated proposal is such. But if I would be running a virtual machine or a bigger monolitical app (like STATA or similar) and the system - a laptop - goes "suspend to RAM and after a while suspend to disk, would the size of swap not have to be identical to the size of RAM to avoid surprises? So I would need to define a swap of 8GB?
Thanks in advance for your input.
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