Partition size and No. Reccomendations

[Gurus Knugum]

Den 2010-09-06 11:19:22 skrev Vic Main <vmain at shaw.ca>:

> 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.

Maybe it's a matter of taste or something, but I personally prefer to also  
have a separate /home. If I some day want to install Ubuntu or another  
distribution from scratch, I don't need to erase my own stuff. And if I  
install Ubuntu from scratch, all of my settings remains in the fresh  
installation.

However, always backup anyway. Anything can go wrong.

-- 
Kind regards

Johnny Rosenberg