[plug] Installing Debian

[The Thought Assassin]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Simon Scott (SSC) wrote:
> This touches on an interesting topic that maybe you should keep in mind.
> When you have 2 or more different distros installed on one machine, you dont
> need a distinct set of partitions for each.
> For example, as you have found out you *need* to share a /boot partition
> otherwise lilo coughs up.

To be more precise, the distro from which you run LILO, needs to be able
to see all of the boot information for both distros. A shared /boot
partition can be a good way of achieving this, but not the only way.

> You can also share swap partitions I believe, and obviously you would want
> to share /home

You can also share /tmp if that is a partition.

> Just out of interests sake, obviously I would need read/write access to
> /home and /var, but would it work if I mounted all the other partitions as
> read only?

You need to be able to write /tmp, but that can be a RAMdisk.

> Im thinking it would be a good idea to leave everything possible
> read only unless installing new software, at which point you could remount
> read/write.

You are thinking right, from a security and reliability POV. On the other
hand, you might find it a nuisance in practise, and unfortunately, there
is a lot of broken software out there that will violate your assumptions.

> This is also interesting from the perspective of running a thin-ish client
> with the major partitions mounted via NFS. You would only really need
> /boot and /var on the client I believe?

If that. /var can be non-local or volatile. (but not shared)
/boot is necessarily local, if you have a /boot. Otherwise you can boot
from the network and dispense with local disks altogether. (still a good
idea to have a local swap partition, though, and some things might be
worth storing or caching locally for speed reasons)

Most of these decisions depend on what you want out of your embedded
system, and how close to vanilla you need to keep your userland.

-Greg