Partition Scheme & LVM

As of the time of this writing, the notebook in my sig is still in its building stages. While I eagerly await its arrival, I can't help planning out the OS installation and so find myself faced with the age-old dilemma of how I ought to partition my drive space. I would much appreciate your input and suggestions regarding this delicate matter.

The notebook will come with a 320GB hd. I want my partition scheme to be well-organized but flexible enough to accommodate distro testing and changing needs, so a system installed in an LVM seems like the best choice.

Here's what I had in mind: The first 80GB will be made into two primary partitions for /boot and Windows, and the rest of the space (~240GB) will be divided equally into six logical partitions, each 40GB in size, to be added and removed from an LVM volume group as needed.

Code:

/dev/sda1	500 MB	Linux	/boot
/dev/sda2	79 GB	NTFS	Windows
/dev/sda5	40 GB	Linux	vg0 <-----------LVM volume group
/dev/sda6	40 GB	Linux	vg0
/dev/sda7	40 GB	Linux	vg0
/dev/sda8	40 GB	Linux	vg0
/dev/sda9	40 GB	Linux	vg0
/dev/sda10	40 GB	Linux	vg0

Inside vg0, the system will be partitioned out extensively into logical volumes.

Code:

/dev/vg0/lvolswap	4 GB	swap
/dev/vg0/lvolroot	10 GB	Linux	/
/dev/vg0/lvoltmp	4 GB	Linux	/tmp
/dev/vg0/lvolvar	8 GB	Linux	/var
/dev/vg0/lvolvarlog	4 GB	Linux	/var/log
/dev/vg0/lvolhome	10 GB	Linux	/home
/dev/vg0/lvoltrunk	80 GB	Linux	/trunk <------------for storage

Are any of those logical volumes too small or large? The above setup leaves about 120GB of extensible space that I can add to any of those logical volumes as necessary. And from what I understand, LVM will allow me to empty out a physical partition with a command that moves all the data to other partitions, after which the clean partition can be safely removed from vg0 and freed for use in other things. Would I be correct in that?

I've never manually installed a distro on LVM before (I'll be using Arch Linux), and I'd love to hear from people who've had experience installing and maintaining an LVM-based system. Especially, I'd like to know if there are any issues pertaining to LVM itself that we should be aware of before committing to it. From all accounts, it's a safe and stable technology, but again, I've never had experience maintaining it. (Except for a brief stint with Fedora and Disk Druid, but it was all GUI and I tried no fancy tricks.)

Thanks!

 

Installing the OS now.

Arch is working nicely in its LVM environment so far. Base system is already up, sound works, wireless yet untried.

I'm getting Xorg up now... and leaning towards KDEmod, although I do love Openbox....

 

I'm having a problem with cpufrequtils. The acpi-cpufreq driver refuses to load and returns a "Device not found" error. I would try loading speedstep-centrino, except that Arch's cpufrequtils package doesn't seem to include it....

 

Wireless works without a hitch. Using clean, lightweight netcfg scripts. Goodbye, wicd!