Partition Recomendations

[belovedmonster]

This and many other aspects of installing and using Mint are covered in the User Guide
http://www.linuxmint.com/pub/Daryna_User_Guide-4.1.pdf (page 18 onwards)

In short, you would want to do it manually.

[Fred]

Cambo105,

Greetings,

The threads below have some pretty good commentary related to your question. You might want to familiarize yourself with some of the other issues there too.

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... rtitioning

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... rtitioning

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... rtitioning

Enjoy,

Fred

[Fred]

Cambo105,

It is the total of swap plus ram should not exceed 4 Gig. So if you have 2 Gig of ram your swap file need not be any larger than 2 Gig.

This is not a hard fast rule. Just a rule of thumb. The kernel will not see more than 4 Gig total so more swap in your case is just wasted space.

You might have noticed that I talked about the space needs of / root) and /home in some of these posts also.

Enjoy,

Fred

[Fred]

Cambo105,

Let's take your last question first. Whether your / (root) needs to be bigger or not really depends more on how big your build environment or IDE is. Unless you are talking very large programs, they won't have a lot of impact on your space needs. Not knowing what kind of IDE you will be using it would be hard for me to say what your space needs might be. If you want to go to 12 - 14 Gig for / (root) you would have to have some pretty robust tools and/or big programs to ever get in trouble, space wise.

In Linux everything is part of the file system. / (root) contains everything. /boot, /user, /etc, /home, etc. are folders that are contained in / (root). In Linux you can "mount" a folder anywhere in your storage system you wish. Your file system doesn't have to be all on one hard drive or even all on your physical machine for that matter. So you can mount your entire file system together on one partition or you can put part of it on one partition and part on another partition. In most cases, for a general purpose computer, I recommend breaking your file system up into 2 parts. Since your /home folder contains all your personal configuration files and data, I would put that on a separate partition from the rest of / (root).

Swap is a special case, and is used basically as extra ram when needed. It goes on its' own partition.

Before I can recommend a partition table I need to know what your current partitioning is. Are you keeping Vista in a dual Boot? How many partitions do you have now? How big are they? How are they numbered? Where is your unallocated space? In the middle, at the end?

I need more information to help you with the partitioning table.

Fred

[Fred]

Cambo105,

Let me tell you my position with Vista. I have never even seen Vista, let alone used it. So I can't express an opinion about the usability or reliability of Vista's tools. I can tell you that my experience with Microsoft's products in general has been less than stellar.

I assume you have downloaded and burned the Mint 4 iso live cd image. Put that in your drive and boot it. When you get the desk top loaded look in the menu and you will find a program called "Gparted." Open that program and you will see a graphical representation of your hard drive. Confirm that you in fact have the partitions, and only the partitions, your other program said you have.

You might want to refer back to this thread, about half way down the page.

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... rtitioning

If your partitions are as you said the are, you will need to get your unallocated space to the right, or to the end of your partition table. This will mean putting your recovery partition adjacent to, or flush with your ntfs Vista partition.

Please look closely at this how-to. Gparted is a powerful tool.

http://www.howtoforge.com/partitioning_with_gparted

You need to read and understand this before you try to use Gparted.

If you right click on the recovery partition you will see an option called move/resize. You want to move that partition to the left, up against the ntfs partition. Do not resize or format it. Just move it. You will now have your unallocated space at the end of the partition table.

If what you told me is correct you will have 2 partitions existing. You will want to create 3 more.

sda1 ntfs Vista existing primary
sda2 fat16/32 recovery existing primary
sda4 swap swap new Mint extended/logical
sda5 ext3 / (root) new Mint extended/logical
sda6 ext3 /home new Mint extended/logical

Note: The missing sda3 is not a typo. It is an unseen place holder for the greater extended partition.

sda4 swap 2 Gig. format
sda5 ext3 12 Gig. format
sda6 ext3 33 Gig. format

After you review carefully, and successfully commit the changes, you can run the install program and mount the partitions as I indicated. When you get to that part select manual partitioning.

Enjoy,

Fred

[Fred]

Cambo105,

No sir, you didn't miss anything, it was me. I miss read the amount of space you had available, my mistake. Take the difference out of /home to make it come out right.

Fred

[MagnusB]

Just to make things clear, as there seem to be some topics about partition tables.
1. Mint can install to allocated space, automagically. If you have so and so much free for it use manual if you feel up to it, but you could also use Guided, just use the slider to add so and so many % (it also shows the size) you want to use, if it have to it will resize existing partition (making them smaller, not bigger). When resizing partitions there is always a danger of loosing data, always make a backup.
2. Manual partitions is a great way to go, I always use manual (some times I even use GParted LiveCD to make my partition table, even though the root partition always have to be formated on a clean install), even if I want my entire drive to be used (mostly because 5 GB swap is a waste...). All you need is 1 swap partition and one ext3/2 partition with mount point /. If you want to make a third partition with mount point /home (for your personal data). Swap partition should be around 2*RAM, depending on your RAM. If you have 1 GB RAM or more, I would use 1*RAM, below 2*RAM. I.e. if you have 256 MB RAM, make the swap at least 512 MB.

[MagnusB]

Probably some leftover space, you could try expanding the nearest partitions to include those extra MB, but I would just forget them....

[MagnusB]

Root mountpoint: /
Home mountpoint: /home
Swap does not use a mointpoint