beginner's guide to LVM

After about three weeks of working with it, I have my Fedora Core 6 system very well configured now. There are about 122 software updates waiting in the wings for Core 6, but I haven't wanted to do any updates to it in case the updates break something. So I want to do a backup of the system first. Unfortunately, by default, the standard Core 6 install creates logical volumes for /root and swap instead of good old ext2 or ext3. Argh. So I've had to dust off my poor LVM skills.

A fanastic beginner's guide for LVM is this article by Falko Timme:
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm

Note that if you do download the Debian Etch virtual machine for this tutorial, you will have to change the default keyboard layout. I believe Falko is German, so the keyboard was very strange. Hunting and pecking, I did find my way to the dash, which had moved to where the ? and / is. So to change your keyboard to your country of origin and layout, you'll need to run through the following command in an SSH window or at the prompt of the virtual machine:
dpkg-reconfigure console-data

Next, I'm going to investigate Falko's second article on how to backup and restore LVMs here:
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm_snapshots

cheers.