Manual partitioning

[colyn]

I picked up a laptop today at work. Company is getting rid of no longer used laptops..

It currently has a fresh install of the virus called Vista but I am going to wipe and install Mint 9KDE.

Previous installs on my other computers was done by letting install setup a root and swap partition automatically but I want to include a home partition on this one so will be doing it manually.

What is a reasonable amount on GB to allot to swap and root each? The rest will then be alloted to the home partition.

[vincent]

It would be nice to know how much hard drive space you're working with, as well as the amount of RAM your new laptop has. Without knowing how much space you have, I'm going to offer some generic advice; swap should be at most 2x your RAM, although if you have >2GB RAM, I'd stick with 1x that amount for swap (even if you have more than enough RAM, you're still going to need swap to hibernate); / should be anywhere between 5 GB and 20 GB...anything more than that is somewhat overkill, unless you plan to install all the packages you can get from the repos, or something to that effect. The remaining space can all be given to /home, and/or any other data partitions you decide to setup, keeping in mind that there's a limit of 4 primary partitions on one hard drive.

[Aging Technogeek]

Swap

If you want to be able to use the hibernate function, Swap must be equal to or slightly larger than the installed ram. If your system has 1 GB or less of ram installed, and your hard drive is big enough, the general consensus is to install Swap equal to twice the ram.

/ (root)

I generally agree with most advanced users who partition manually that 10-15 GB is more than ample for a root partition. I normally use 10, sometimes as little as 7.5 GB, and have never filled a root partition yet.

[colyn]

Thanks.

I'll be working with a 250GB drive with 2GB ram.

I had heard that 2GB was right for swap but wasn't sure about root.

[rhodry]

Seeing as you are starting with a 'virgin' drive, I would suggest the following option for you to think about:

1. primary ext4 partition labeled / = 20Gb - put whole of linux install here (no separate /home)

2.primary partition labeled /swap = 3Gb - plenty big enough for hibernation etc.

3. balance of drive as extended partition within which:

4. logical ext4 partition of 20Gb left blank at this stage

5. balance of extended partition (about 200Gb) as ext4 logical partition labeled /data.

Notes:

this gives you plenty of swap at a fast part of the drive,

be very careful to distinguish between the "root" directory of the system that is labeled "/" and the /root folder which is the home folder for the root user - in step 1. use / NOT /root as the label,

I would create the 1st partition as primary so that if you ever want to put Windows on here for any reason you will have a partition that you can already use.

the blank spare partition is connected to using /data instead of separate /home. It is there if you want to add another distro to try (Mint version or not).

You then just share the data partition with your other Linux and all files can be made readily available with various forms of mounting and sharing. In /data you put your folders like music, images, etc. Then you can have each user under each distro access them with soft links in their individual /home folder.

If this all seems too much by all means go with simpler advice earlier. I don't always explain stuff as well as I would like. I just like to encourage new users to use a separate /data folder rather than separate /home folder because it gives you SO much more flexibility down the track for the price of a little extension of understanding at the start.

Good luck,
rhodry.

[colyn]

Thanks for the suggestions. However this laptop will be used for graphics/image editing and will only be running one OS.

The extra space I allotted for /home is to hold the photos etc..

I have a couple of other laptops that can be used for testing other distro's since I have extra drives for them.

[Cressida]

Seeing as you are starting with a 'virgin' drive, I would suggest the following option for you to think about:

1. primary ext4 partition labeled / = 20Gb - put whole of linux install here (no separate /home)

2.primary partition labeled /swap = 3Gb - plenty big enough for hibernation etc.

3. balance of drive as extended partition within which:

4. logical ext4 partition of 20Gb left blank at this stage

5. balance of extended partition (about 200Gb) as ext4 logical partition labeled /data.

Notes:

the blank spare partition is connected to using /data instead of separate /home. It is there if you want to add another distro to try (Mint version or not).

You then just share the data partition with your other Linux and all files can be made readily available with various forms of mounting and sharing. In /data you put your folders like music, images, etc. Then you can have each user under each distro access them with soft links in their individual /home folder.

If this all seems too much by all means go with simpler advice earlier. I don't always explain stuff as well as I would like. I just like to encourage new users to use a separate /data folder rather than separate /home folder because it gives you SO much more flexibility down the track for the price of a little extension of understanding at the start.

Good luck,
rhodry.

I am setting up a new 320GB HD and was thinking I'd set up a separate partition for both /home and /data.

Is there really anything wrong with having both?

I'm thinking that way I can do a reinstall if I need to down the road and my /data will not be affected and also by having the /home the config. computer setting files will not be affected either?

Is there anything special to get the computer to save the documents, files, etc. to /data instead of it going to /home? (In the past it has saved stuff to /home but I've never had a /data partition so I don't know how to make that the default place to save stuff...)

Also, I plan to learn and mess around a bit with VirtualBox and I understand it uses /home for something but not sure.

If this is reasonable idea then about what size should /home be? 30-40GB ?

[ezas]

That's what I was wondering, why not /home and /data? What's the advantage of just /data?

This is how I dice it.

/ 20GB, /home 4O GB, and /data is 80 GB

/data is readable by both my distros

/home is kinda big so I don't have to worry about downloading ISOs, torrents, ripping new music, etc.

For the most part I do all 'work' in home. Every few days to a week I move completed 'tasks' to /data

/home gets backed up to an external drive. /data gets backed up to the external drive, and to a hosted backup site.

[rhodry]

Nothing wrong with /home AND /data as separate partitions at all. I just don't bother any more. The only things in /home are the standard (dot) config files generated by apps and my download folder. All the others, like Documents, Images, Music, etc, etc I put permanently in /data; then, link them back to each users /home. So each user still sees a folder called Documents in their /home but the contents are actually stored on /data/Documents.

Using Luckybackup to external usb drive, I then have 3 backup profiles set up - one for whole system, one for /data and one for individual user /home folders. I don't have any machines with only one user.

There are numerous options for all this stuff, the right one being the most efficient for your use. I also setup a common group called 'share' and have each user join it, but I digress.

What you are describing will work ok.

cheers,
rhodry.