[NTLUG:Discuss] Starting over.

[Scott Denlinger]

I discovered this morning that my hard drive crashed. It was under 
warranty, my data is on another drive, crucial configuration files are 
backed up and the replacement drive is on its way, so it's all good. Now 
I have the opportunity to reinstall, start over, and avoid some 
situations which were giving me problems on my last system. A few things 
are not negotiable. It will be Debian Woody, with a 2.4.19 kernel. KDE 
only. X started from the command line. No xdm, or kdm.

Now for the questions. Should I use devfs? I had a problem with devfs 
and my Zip drive, and after looking at the devfs FAQ, I wasn't that 
convinced that devfs offered me any significant advantages. I had 
installed it previously because someone suggested it was a good idea, 
but now I'm not so sure that it makes sense for my system: 2 IDE hard 
drives, a CD-ROM drive, Zip drive on secondary IDE channel, and a QIC 
tape drive on a separate controller card. Given this hardware, is there 
that much advantage to using devfs?

How much advantage does a journalling file system have over the 
traditional ext2 file system? I was using ext3 on my last system (Reiser 
before that, but that was problematic). If I do decide to use a 
journalling file system, should I use it on my /var partition as well? 
Or is there only an advantage to using it for boot/root partitions? My 
/home partition is on a separate hard drive, so that will stay ext3.

What size swap partition should I configure? Right now I have 96 MB of 
RAM, but I may soon bump it up to 384 MB, which is the max. available 
for my system board. I've read somewhere that the maximum swap partition 
size which Linux can use is 128 MB. Is this true? I will be running a 
MySQL database on this box, but it will basically be a learning tool for 
me. It won't be for a production, enterprise-type database. Also no 
graphics programming, or other CPU intensive stuff.

Thanks very much in advance for any encouragements, insights, strong 
opinions, warnings, flames or whatever.

Scott Denlinger