Partition size and No. Reccomendations

[Liam Proven]

On 3 September 2010 22:04, Li Li <lili_lilly at charter.net> wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

Good advice!

I think 10GB is a little cautious or conservative, these days, with
disk space being so very cheap. I like to stick to the old maxim of
keeping all filesystems under 75% use, to reduce fragmentation, and a
6GB base install is perilously close to 10GB - when you start out,
with the APT cache empty, no log files etc., you will already be at
60% utilization. I would at least double that; 20GB for / is very
generous and 32GB (a nice round number in binary) is positively
spendthrift.

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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?

:¬)

This is indeed what I do, as well.

> 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.

As for the actual partition layout, the ideal is this.

The PC BIOS allows only 4 primary partitions per disk, with 1 active
at a time. The active flag does not matter to Linux, but it does to
Windows.

If you are dual-booting, then your Windows partition will need to be
primary and active. So that is your one active partition "spent". If
you make all the other partitions logical ones in an extended
partition, that gives you the most flexibility and room to move things
around.

For the rest of the partitions, I would suggest shrinking the Windows
boot partition, which is probably NTFS, and creating a single extended
partition occupying the rest of the disk.

In this, I would place, in this order:
[1] The Linux root partition, of 20GB or so. Linux is perfectly happy
booting from a logical drive.

Now find how much remaining space you have. Take away 2GB from this
amount and divide what's left into halves.

[2] Linux /home partition - 1st half of the remaining space.
[3] Shared FAT32 data partition - 2nd half of the remaining space.
[4] Linux swap partition: the last 2GB of the drive, or if you have
>2GB of RAM and want to hibernate, then round physical RAM up to the
nearest whole number of gigabytes.


-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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