Partition size and No. Reccomendations

[Li Li]

On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 12:51 -0700, Vic Main wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> I've been trying to make sense (cents) of the different partitions 
> being recommended by different sources.
> 
> One source says 4, another 3, and even just 2. (a 10GB for /, a 2GB 
> for swap). One says 10GB is enough for the whole install, another the 
> whole 100GB drive is necessary.
> 
> I have a 2 Gig swap, a 2 Gig boot, and a 30 Gig and 10 Gig both 
> unassigned, and finally a 110 Gig ntfs partition on a second drive
> 
> It does seem that Ubuntu has access to all of the ntfs drives, so any 
> material I need to store can go there??
> 
> I'm dual booting with windows XP.
> 

You don't say how much memory you have....

If you have 2 GiB or more memory, you really don't need a swap partition
that is more than just a bit larger than memory (for hibernation, i.e
ACPI State S4).  Even on this very old 2 GiB machine I almost never use
swap unless I'm doing something really memory-intensive like running
virtual machines in Virtual Box.

My fairly big installs of both Linux-Mint (a Ubuntu derivative with
default colors that don't provoke a headache) and Ubuntu 10.10 beta on
this computer take up less than 6 GiB each -- I have most of KDE
installed as well as the default GNOME.

You probably want at least 10 GiB for /; swap just bigger than memory;
as much as WinXP can spare for /home (and you certainly want /home on
its own partition!).  If you can put swap on a different hard disk
from / and /home, do it.

I don't see any reason anymore for separate /boot, /var or /tmp
partitions, even though I'm old enough to remember when they were
positively required.  Things are *much* easier now.  

Don't store Linux data on NTFS.  It is a proprietary filesystem that had
to be reverse engineered so that it could be read and written to by
Linux.  For a long time, Linux could only read and not write to NTFS,
and writes still aren't entirely trouble-free. The best practice is to
create a FAT-32 partition for data which can be shared between Windows
and Linux.  I promise you that once you get familiar with Ubuntu, you
won't be using Windows anyway.  Who wants a clunky and insecure 10 year
old OS?

I recommend PartEd Magic for partition manipulation.  It comes as a
liveCD and installs easily to a USB key if you like.  It makes it very
easy to back things up to optical media, test disks and do all your
partitioning work.  http://partedmagic.com/ Free, of course.



-- 
Lilly
godbless --everyone --no-exceptions
Linux 2.6.32-21-generic Linux Mint 9 Isadora, Gnome 2.30.2