installing ubuntu on a new system - questions

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 2025-07-19 at 13:38 -0400, Robert Heller wrote:
> And I would guess almost the entire VPS sector uses it.  When I had a
> batch of VMs on my (now dead) AMD ATX box, I used a LVM logical volume
> for each VM I had.  (Actually I use a LVM logical volume for the one
> x86_64 VM I have on my PI5.)
> 
> Not using LVM means either just having one giant file system (a truely
> horrible idea from a sane backup point of view), or having to grovel
> with gparted on a live ISO on a USB flash drive whenever you need a
> new parition or  need to resize partitions.  Been there back in the
> olden days.  Ugh...  With  LVM one just uses lvesize / resize2fs -- I
> even wrote a bash script to do this.

Hi,

I agree with Liam.

Different approaches have their pros and cons.

Given that the client will be using a 128G SSD and a 1T HDD, not much
can get giant.

Also, given the nature of the questions the OP is asking, LVM is surely
far too complicated for the OP.

I do have multiple VMs with giant files, but I know exactly where those
files are. They are not randomly spread across multiple SSDs.

Examples, a non-giant virtual disk file and two giant virtual disk
files:

$ /bin/ls -hAltr /mnt/winos10/winos10/*vdi /mnt/winos11/winos11/*vdi /var/lib/libvirt/images/mnt/vm.dedu.11/vm*
-rw------- 1 root        root         72G Nov 25  2024 /var/lib/libvirt/images/mnt/vm.dedu.11/vm.dedu.11
-rw------- 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 737G Jul 13 23:22 /mnt/winos10/winos10/winos10.vdi
-rw------- 1 rocketmouse rocketmouse 840G Jul 14 07:17 /mnt/winos11/winos11/winos11.vdi

If the partitions with the huge Windows (renamed to winOS ;) VDIs aren't
mounted, I can run gprated from the running Linux and resize the
partitions, no need to boot another Linux. FWIW you can use raw rather
than a virtual disk file format and/or shared folders. Many more
hundreds of GiBs for these Windows VDIs are stored via shared folders,
otherwise they would be far more than twice as large.

Regards,
Ralf