On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 1:51 AM, Zack Yovel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi, I'm also new to SL, have it on my laptop and intend to install it on my
> desktop for virtualization. I'm a little confused by GParted not being
> talked about here. It installed with the live cd image on my laptop, and I'm
> used to resizing partitions with that, wouldn't it work on SL?

Gparted is a reasonable *first attempt* at providing a usable GUI for
partition management. Under the hood, it's all parted and other
command line tools. It provides no useful features not available from
the command line, and in fact lacks some critical ones. (Specific
block allocation size of 64 for the "DOS combatility" space at the
start of a disk, for example, prevents 4096 byte block alignment for
virtualized guest images. This *matters* for NetApp or other 4096 byte
block servers for virtualized guests, which have no way to directliy
detect the alignment and take an amazing performance hit.)

If possible, it's worth learning the basic tools. parted is really
cool, and learning some of the options and settings of the fsck
variants for ext2, ext3, and ext4 can help tune things for
performance. For example, most people don't need "atime" and get a
nice performance benefit from turning it the heck off. And frankly,
most peopple don't need LVM at all. Modern Linuxes do quite well
booting directly from the primary partition, and since swap space is
so rarely used, swap can gracefully be a file *on* the main
filesystem. And backup systems are no longer disk based (such as the
old and deprecated "dump" tool) but are active fileystem based (such
as rsync, or star to include SELinux metadata).

So unless you have performance tuning or overflow protection you need,
most desktop and server environments do very well with a sinigle,
large partition occupying the whole drive. This bamkes space
allocation and backup a lot easier unless you want to, say, limit
/home to only 800 Gig out of a 1000 Gig drive to protect your base
operating system from family members who download too much.