Considerations before you install

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Fifo

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Fifo »

great guide. thanks. should have read this long time ago ;)

i'd like to add that a lot of configuration files go into /etc not only /home. i've read that you can't create /etc (and /bin, /lib) as a separate partition, because it might be needed during boot, before other partitions than / can be accessed.

what i do is backup my /etc and /home folder (and some others that are important to me) using Back In Time. An awesome program available for gnome and kde. it uses rsync and chron to create snapshots of you files. thanks to back in time you'll be able to restore all (depending how you configure it) previous versions of your files.
i also tried timevault and flyback. they are nice but back in time rules!

i still keep /home on a separate partition.
Fred

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Fred »

austin_john,

Looks fine. Use the manual option and specify the mount points for your pre-made partitions. :-)

Fred
Fred

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Fred »

austin_john,

For the sake of simplicity, I would suggest you leave the NTFS shared partition alone. Don't try to mount it or tell the installer to recognize it.

Then after the install is complete and you have familiarized yourself with the system a bit look at the link below and mount it wherever you like.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=22093

Good luck. :-)

Fred
mikhou

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by mikhou »

Fred, great post. Even though I don't understand all of what has been said above, it has certainly improved my knowledge of partitioning in general and Linux Mint as well. I've been dual booting with Vista and Mint for a few months now and have now made the plunge into fully operating in Mint. I am going to continue to run Quickbooks but only through Virtual Box. Last night, I installed a new hard drive and reinstalled Mint. I considered the idea of using remastersys so that I could have an exact replica of what I had been using but in the end decided to reinstall from the the original Mint 7 Gloria iso. I used your first "simple" partitioning scheme as I am fairly new to all of this and wanted to keep it simple. So, I've got a very small swap partition as I've got 4 GB of RAM. I've got Mint loaded in a 12 GB partition. And then I've got a data partition that mounts at /home. Here are my 2 questions. 1) Would it be better to setup another partition that would house the Virtual XP that I am going to install to run Quickbooks? How much HD space and how much RAM should I allocate to a virtual XP? 2) If and when I want to upgrade to the latest Mint distro, is there a way to do that without having to reinstall all of my apps that I have added on (VLC media player, truecrypt, xiphos, etc.)? Where are apps kept? Are they on the / partition or the /home partition?

I know that this is more than 2 questions :-), but they kinda wrap up into 2. Thanks for your help. I'm enjoying the opportunity to learn more about Linux.

mikhou
ColJep

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by ColJep »

When I discovered Linux Mint I installed Gloria on a test machine with two SATA drives. An 80GB one that I set up with a 15GB partition set as / and the rest unallocated space and a small swap partition. The second drive is 120GB and I set this as /home with another small swap partition. I intended to use the unallocated space to try other distros.

I am sure I did this from the install menu.

When Ubuntu 9.10 and Mint 8 Helena arrived it seems that this easy set up is no longer possible. Gparted runs fine from the live version but only one drive is shown when trying to install. I now have a trial installation using the whole of the 120GB drive and I suppose I can start disconnecting one drive, using Gparted from the new install and then reconnecting and mounting the second drive. A somewhat complex way of doing something simple. Especially when disabled and only having the use of one arm. :)

What fun.
ninedragons1pearl

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by ninedragons1pearl »

I had installed mint 7 some time ago and deleted a xp partition and after creating the new partition I discover I had no permission to that newly created partition. At which point I backed up the data and created a entire partition for Mint. Can this be explained?? :?:
piratesmack

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by piratesmack »

Fred wrote:If you have 4 Gig. of ram on a 32 bit system like Mint, make a very small swap partition anyway, as the kernel expects to have a swap partition available. Not having a swap partition slows the kernel down in certain situations. For this purpose, there is no need for the swap partition to be over 256 KB at most.
I have heard that you need a swap partition at least the size of your RAM to hibernate.
I don't know if this is true, but you might want to add that if it is.
Fred

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Fred »

piratesmack wrote:
I have heard that you need a swap partition at least the size of your RAM to hibernate.
I don't know if this is true, but you might want to add that if it is.
You are mostly correct. I was thinking of a desktop when I wrote the original post, in which case hibernation would pretty much be a moot issue. I didn't make that very clear however.

It isn't a requirement to have a swap partition equal to or larger than your RAM in order to hibernate however. You can designate an alternate location to put the hibernation file. The default hibernation location is the swap partition or file however. It is certainly most convenient to leave it set to the default and make the swap partition large enough to be used to hibernate on a notebook though.

Sorry for any confusion this may have caused. :-)

Fred
piratesmack

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by piratesmack »

Fred wrote:You can designate an alternate location to put the hibernation file. The default hibernation location is the swap partition or file however.
Thanks, I didn't know that.

I have a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM, what do you think about putting swap in a small ramdisk?
Husse

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Husse »

I have a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM, what do you think about putting swap in a small ramdisk?
Ramdisk - isn't that a real logical error - put the swap in RAM?
Apart from the endless loop problem there might be...
piratesmack

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by piratesmack »

Husse wrote:
I have a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM, what do you think about putting swap in a small ramdisk?
Ramdisk - isn't that a real logical error - put the swap in RAM?
Apart from the endless loop problem there might be...

I got the idea from a rather knowledgeable person at LQ.
He said it's better than no swap at all and that even a small swapspace inside ram can prevent your system from locking up.

It sounded weird to me, too.
Still, I think I will try it. If it causes problems, I could always just add a swap partition.
Husse

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Husse »

Ah - but if you want a small swap just to make Linux happy you could try Fred's suggestion to create a swap file - not that i know how, but Fred knows :)
piratesmack

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by piratesmack »

Husse wrote:Ah - but if you want a small swap just to make Linux happy you could try Fred's suggestion to create a swap file - not that i know how, but Fred knows :)
Yeah, that's probably a much better idea. :)

I guess I'm just looking for ways to use all this RAM. Maybe I should install Vista? :P
Husse

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by Husse »

I guess I'm just looking for ways to use all this RAM. Maybe I should install Vista? :P
You'd have to buy more RAM :)
RestlessSoul

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by RestlessSoul »

Hello all; Some nooby questions I'd appreciate advice on =)

I would like to install Mint alongside windows 7. I have gparted, and I was thinking of partitioning my hard drive like so;

sda1 --------- NTFS (Windows 7 Install)
sda2 --------- NTFS (Windows 7 Disk Image)
sda3 --------- Linux Mint
sda4 --------- DATA PARTITION

How big should the Mint partition be to allow for software installation and upgrades? And where should the Swap partition go?

The idea being, I use the data partition to store files apart from the OS's, and available to both. Could I Separate the home directory to sda4 and have it available to Mint AND Windows 7?

A better overall question, Do I have the right idea for formatting my hard drive, or do I have it completely backasswards?
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T J Tulley
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Re: Considerations before you install

Post by T J Tulley »

My question too - I searched as advised in "Before you post, read this". I am expecting delivery of a new laptop with Windows 7 64-bit in a 500 GiB hard drive and 4 GiB RAM.

I shall have to use the partitoner in the Install program unless it can be done with Windows Disc Manager - presumably that's still there?

Is Mint-8 Standard edition compatible with 64-bit Win-7?

I assume that a newly-installed Win-7 will all be sitting in the first part of the drive, and not disturbed by chopping off most of the drive into new partitions? I gather that if I first make a System Rescue Disk the system can in fact be restored?

The basic question is, how much space does Win-7 and any Windows-specific software require? I was thinking of 100 GiB but will 50 be enough if my data is in another one or more partitions?

I expect to create sda2 as an extended partition, with 4 logical drives sda5, 6, 7 and 8 for data (50 GiB), / (10 GiB), swap (10 GiB), and home (30 GiB).

That will leave 300 or 350 GiB free space for subsequent versions of LinuxMint or for expansion. Backups will have to go to an external drive or via a network to my PC - experimentation ahead!

I shall be grateful for comments and suggestions, especially about space required for Windows and associated software.
Yours hopefully -

Theo Tulley.
Using a PC with 2GB RAM, 3 hdds and a 1.7 GHz Celeron cpu.
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JimQ
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Re: Considerations before you install

Post by JimQ »

I' new to Linux and have been reading the forums and hopefully I understand what I read but no guarantee. To prepare myself before I do my final install of Linux Mint 8, 64 bit. I’ve come up with the following:

Hardware: i7 cpu, 12 GB ram, sda = 750GB hard drive, sdb = 750GB hard drive, sdc = 320GB hard drive, sdd = 320GB hard drive.

Thinking about using the 320GB drives in another machine unless someone has better ideas.

I assume that if I backup /home I will always have a copy of my data.

I plan on running VirtualBox to install Windows 7 and or XP to run some programs until I can completely wean myself away from Windows. This would also allow me to try different distros too.

I do video editing and plan on setting up a web server on this box with apache, php & mySql for offline web development. Also plan on doing some programming.

The swap are for partitions are for hibernation/s suspend to disk if ever needed.

After reading the information on partitions from the forums I came up with the following scheme for partitioning my disks. Any insight from the techno geeks is welcome.



Mount Point Disk Size Type Partition
/boot sda1 1gb ext3 primary
/ sda2 20gb ext3 primary
sda3 extended
/usr sda5 10gb ext3 logical
/opt sda6 5gb ext3 logical
/svr sda7 20gb ext3 logical
/var sda8 20gb ext3 logical
swap sda9 7gb swap logical

swap sdb1 7gb swap primary
/home sdb2 500gb ext3 primary


I also plan on moving my family to LM8, most computers will have 1 to 3 users, and here’s how I plan to partition their hard drive. I plan on remotely administrating them.

Mount Point Disk Size Type Partition
/ sda1 20gb ext3 primary
swap sda2 2x memory swap primary
sda3 extended
/tmp sda5 10gb ext3 logical
/var sda6 10gb ext3 logical
/home sda7 most of ext3 logical
what’s left


Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jim
Linux Mint 19.3 Mate & 17.3 Mate x64
Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe
CPU: i7-3770K, 3.40Ghz LGA1155
Memory: G.Skill, F3-1866C10D-16GSR 32GB
Video: Intel HD Graphics 4000
breaker

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by breaker »

6) Journaled files systems also represent more overhead to the kernel and take more space on the hard drive for the file system structure itself. There is no advantage to using a journaled file system on a partition that will rarely be written to. /boot is a good example of this. It is almost never written to, so if you use a separate /boot partition, it should be ext2 and not ext3.
Fred, this is a great post, I wish I had found it earlier. One question, what about the new grub2, and the fact that if you are playing around with menu entries and doing the update-grub the /boot/grub dir will have a lot of usage, or is it still minimal? Without googling... I guess you are saying the cpu overhead and disk space between ext2 and ext3 is fairly significant?
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T J Tulley
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Re: Considerations before you install

Post by T J Tulley »

Please may I join in?

I'm interested to read that you now recommend a separate data partition: - I've alway done this; it is essentially the My Documents folder of my original Windows system.

Now I've just installed Helena on a new laptop with Windows-7 and I can't paste data into that folder: I've posted a message about this in the Installation and Boot forum, and am hoping for a reply.

Yours sincerely,

Theo Tulley.
[System details given in other post - my profile signature gives my PC details and is inapplicable].
uberspeed

Re: Considerations before you install

Post by uberspeed »

If I may...
I jump in and out of the linux world playing with distros, read up, install, lose interest. Last I did was Ubuntu 9.04 then upgraded in place to 9.10
I have dual boot with WinXP. 4GB of RAM and a 300GB drive on a Dell D630
When I first installed I did:
60GB WinXP ntfs
20GB ext3 /
6GB swap
215GB ext3 /home
In that home I kept all my files for both XP and Ubuntu, I don't want to lose this data obviously.
Now that I want to move to Mint, I'll go in with pmagic/gparted whichever tool and I was looking for recommendations as to swap size first, I have read all sorts of recommendations so I'd like an up to date one please. Also, should I simply blow away the 20GB partition and install Mint there, will it pick up all my data on the /home? Since I won't reformat the /home I figure my data will stay intact but I want to make sure Mint uses (absorbs/takes over/inherits?) the current /home with no disruptions. I also read I should make the swap on the end of the drive, perhaps when I go back in to repartition I'll delete the current and place it at the end to follow good etiquette.
Any and all feedback appreciated.
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