I managed to get Fedora 15 to run, at least in text mode. Even the network device eth0 was there without intervention on my part, only the WLAN was not working. I also tried Xubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), which is working fine from a USB stick once i figured out that the USB 3.0 slots give troubles booting from a stick attached to one of them. Once i understood this i used the USB 2.0 slot and had no troubles at all. Still, installing X.org's Xserver to the minimal Fedora installation did not work and searching the net i found only little information about the configuration of the ATI FirePro card (none of it at AMDs/ATIs website, naturally - non-Windows-users deserve to get no support at all, *grrrr*). But as Xubuntu is working somehow i suppose it will be just a matter of time until i figure out how to coerce a native Xserver to cooperation.
Anyways, the last few days i had some other things to do and was not able to work much on the new system, which left me with some time to think over what i want to do. Here is my current plan:
I would like to have two different Linux installations at the "base level", because if one breaks i want to have the other one ready to revive it. I want only the barest minimum installed in these systems, all the really fancy stuff should go to virtual machines running on top of these two. It is a lot easier to clone/restore virtual systems than it is to do so with physical ones.
I want a /home filesystem which i can mount to any of the systems running, so that i can share all the user data between all the systems.
Here is my proposed disk layout:
/dev/sda (Crucial 256GB SSD)
/dev/sda1 /boot (256MB)
/dev/sda2 Volume group "rootvg" (remainder)
rootvg:
LV swaplv swap (16GB)
LV root1lv / (/altroot) (10GB)
LV root2lv /altroot (/) (10GB)
LV homelv /home (20GB)
LV virtsyslv /opt/quemu/VEs (50GB)
The first thing i learned when researching the viability of this concept was that the SSD must not be written completely full or have the performance somewhat degraded. There are even special mount options, which i started to research into - i will keep you updated about my progress.
bakunin
