Partition size and No. Reccomendations

[Vic Main]

At 02:04 PM 09/03/10, you wrote:
>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
Thanks to all the users that replied to my question. I used the 
partition tool that comes on the CD and that worked just fine.
  I ended up with a 2 gig swap and a 35 gig root (/) with a 12 gig 
partition formatted with ext 4, but not assigned.
Everything seems to work fine.

The NVidia driver doesn't help me at all, gives the options of 
320x240 or hold on to your hats 640x480 screen size.
At least the generic driver gives me 1024x768. (The older version of 
Ubuntu gave me 800x600)

I would like to know how to edit the boot.lst. I haven't looked yet, 
it looks quite different that the old boot. Is it edited the same way??

Thanks to All

Vic