Formatting disks¶

Disk and partition sizes¶

The final KaarPux system takes up more than 14GB space:

Unless you use tmpfs for the build directories, you will also have:

/home: 5-10 GB

You should add a good margin to this to allow for further operation and development of the KaarPux system. A 48GB disk partition is probably a good choice.

If you use tmpfs for the build directories, a 32 GB disk partition is probably a good choice.

You will aso need a swap partition. 4 GB is probably a good size for the swap partition.

Finally it is recommended to set aside a separate partition for downloads of at least 8GB.

About BIOS, UEFI, MBR and GPT¶

When your computer boots up, it will controlled by one of:

• a legacy BIOS (see Wikipedia: BIOS)
• a UEFI interface (see Wikipedia: UEFI)

Disks can be partitioned in two “styles”:

• legacy MBR partitioning (see Wikipedia: MBR)
• GPT partitioning (see Wikipedia: GPT)

KaarPux contains tools for manipulating both MBR and GPT partitioning, and can be booted using either the legacy BIOS or the UEFI interface.

However, the instructions for building KaarPux covers only the following two cases:

• legacy BIOS with legacy MBR partitioning.
• UEFI interface with GPT partitioning

Default partitioning - legacy MBR style¶

By default, a KaarPux system is set up with a swap partition, a downloads partions, and a target partition. If you are installing on a separate disk, his might be accomplished with:

FDEV=/dev/sdb # replace /dev/sdb with the device name of your target disk

fdisk ${FDEV}
n
p
1

+4G
n
p
2

+8G
n
p
3


t
1
82
p
w

which will set up a 4G swap partition, a 8G downloads partitions, and the rest of the disk as root partition.

Disk partitioning - GPT style¶

If you are using the “new” GPT style disk partitioning, you can use gdisk to patition the disks:

FDEV=/dev/sdb   # replace /dev/sdb with the device name of your target disk

gdisk ${FDEV}

You will probably want to set aside a small FAT partition as the UEFI partition, but your host system has probably already done that. If not, create the partition and then create a FAT filesystem on it:

EDEV=/dev/sdb1   # replace /dev/sdb1 with the device name of your target partition

mkfs.vfat -F32 ${EDEV}

Swap formatting¶

Format the swap partition:

SWAP=/dev/sdb1   # replace /dev/sdb1 with the device name of your target partition
mkswap ${SWAP}

Downloads partition formatting¶

Create a filesystem on the downloads partition:

DEV=/dev/sdb2   # replace /dev/sdb2 with the device name of your downloads partition

mke2fs -t ext4 -jv ${DEV}
fsck ${DEV}

Target partition formatting¶

Now create a filesystem on the target partition:

DEV=/dev/sdb3   # replace /dev/sdb3 with the device name of your target partition

mke2fs -t ext4 -jv ${DEV}
fsck ${DEV}