Considerations before you install

[GuttaMan]

Hey There Fred, thanks for the feedback man. I took heed to what you said about the swap partition...and since I had 4GB of memory in the system, I figured just to make the swap as small as possible; I was turning the swappiness off anyway.

As far as the size of the partitions go, I'm studying audio engineering & video editing so I need a lot of space for all these audio and video projects I fool around with (not to mention my large Vinyl-to-MP3 collection ). You think it might be a bit of overkill, I still think I need to go larger.

[Fred]

GuttaMan,

You, of course, know your needs better than I do. Go for it my friend. I don't see any show stoppers or no-nos.

Fred

[hrhodes]

2* ram = 1gig


so I will go with 1gig swap and 12 ./


112 combo is that ok?

[Fred]

hrhodes wrote,

so I will go with 1gig swap and 12 ./

Yes sir, that should work just fine.

112 combo is that ok?

I am not sure what you mean there, If you are talking about 112 Gig. as /home, that is big, But you know your data needs better than I do.

Don't put that much into a / partition though.

Hope that helps you sir.

Fred

[GuttaMan]

Now let me ask, If I already plan on creating a separate /usr, /opt, /var, and /home partition, how big (or small) does the root partition need to be? I'm thinking about re-installing Daryna for now, and I'm looking at my current partition and wondering since I got all these separate partitions, does the root really need to be 10 GBs?

[Fred]

GuttaMan

Well, the truth is that most of the space used in / is in /user. /var is a work area, and unless you are compiling programs and putting them in /opt, then /opt is going to be empty. Some games may install in /opt, but none that I know of in the repos. My /opt has zero, nada, nothing in it. Ubuntu doesn't use /opt for any of its' default installs, to my knowledge.

If it was me, I wouldn't put but about 4 Gig. in /. No more than 5 Gig. That is over kill just to make sure /tmp doesn't ever overload anything.

I am using the KDE version, which is bigger than Gnome. I have lots of extra programs on mine for testing and play. As an example, I have three different office suites installed. My total install, including /home is only 7.5 Gig. Of course I use data partitions for my data. My /user is 5.3 Gig. That is where all your program files go. As you can see everything else including the /home config files is only a bit over 2 Gig.

In your case, since you want to split it up, I would probably go with 8 - 10 Gig. /user, 2 Gig. /var, 4 - 5 Gig. /, 8 - 10 Gig. /home, and your data partitions. If you think you will have a lot of special programs that you will put in /opt then make an /opt partition of whatever size you think is appropriate. As you can see that gives you lots of expansion room.

The bottom line is, you know your needs better than I do so size according to what you think is best. One thing you can do to conserve resources is to use the ext2 file system on the /user partition. /user is very seldom written to so a journaling file system on /user doesn't buy you much and costs you cpu cycles and drive space. Just remember. The larger your partitions are and the farther they are from the top of the partition table, the slower they will be. Also, there is no law that says you can't expand a partition later if you need more space. You don't have to commit all your space up front. You can always save some unallocated space to use later where ever you need it.

Have fun,

Fred

[GuttaMan]

Fred, I got myself a good learnin from that last post. I installed a nice bunch of different applications since I did the reinstall and the /opt partition didn't get touch one time, so I'll just leave that alone from now on. Other than that, I will utilize this thread again and that last post when I fool around with these partitions again. Preciate it man!

[Acid_1]

Okay, I keep my partitioning very simple. 3 partitions:

sda1: documents/music/pictures/etc - 40-45 GB
sda2: os - 10-15 GB
sda3: Linux Swap 1-1.5 GB

All except sda3 is an ext3 partition. I keep it simple and easy to upgrade.

[shane]

What an interesting thread!

Fred, you said in one of the posts that one could leave some space unallocated and then add it to another partition when the need arises... am i right?

how do we do this?

for explanation's sake... lets say we have a hardisk partitioned like so

sda1 - swap - 1GB
sda2 - / - 8GB
sda3 - / 20GB
sda4 - unallocated - 10GB

now if / is full and we need more space how can we add the unallocated space to / ? or only part of it...?

[Fred]

shane,

Using the latest stable version of Gparted, you have the option of shrinking, expanding, or moving a partition. In your case, let's say you want to add 2 Gig to your sda2 partition. You would move your sda3 partition down 2 gig. You would then expand your sda2 partition to use up the 2 Gig you just made available.

Hope that answers your question. The url below will take you to the site where you can download the latest stable version of the Gparted live cd iso.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=271779

Fred

[shane]

oh like that... i thought there was some way to create a 2GB partition after /home and have that and sda2 be recognized as one... i think there is a way to do that if i'm not mistaken... like how they have RAID stacks... if thats what they call them...

but coming back to gparted... i have tried editing partitions from ubuntu live cds but i wasnt able to change the starting point/sector of a partition... only the end. maybe i was just doing something wrong...

i didn't know about the beginning of the hard disk being faster... i would have thought the end would would be faster... i.e. at the edge of the spinning platter so the speed is faster than towards the middle... and about swap on multiple hard drives... thats what i used to do till some guys on linuxquestions.org told me it wouldn't improve performance... but logically thinking it should, right?... btw i used to do that in windows too with pagefiles... oh the bad old days of tweaking Windows

[Fred]

shane wrote:

oh like that... i thought there was some way to create a 2GB partition after /home and have that and sda2 be recognized as one... i think there is a way to do that if i'm not mistaken... like how they have RAID stacks... if thats what they call them...

No, you have been misinformed. You can expand the partition size but you can't run 2 partitions mounted to the same mount point.

but coming back to gparted... i have tried editing partitions from ubuntu live cds but i wasnt able to change the starting point/sector of a partition... only the end. maybe i was just doing something wrong...

Please reread my post. You need a later version of Gparted than used in the install cd. Use the latest stable version, as I indicated.

i didn't know about the beginning of the hard disk being faster... i would have thought the end would would be faster... i.e. at the edge of the spinning platter so the speed is faster than towards the middle... and about swap on multiple hard drives... thats what i used to do till some guys on linuxquestions.org told me it wouldn't improve performance... but logically thinking it should, right?... btw i used to do that in windows too with pagefiles... oh the bad old days of tweaking Windows

You are both right and wrong here. The outside of the disk is the beginning of the partition table, and the left side of the Gparted graphic. The outside of the disk or the first partition on the disk is faster than one located close to the inside of the disk or at the bottom of the partition table.

The speed difference used to be much greater than it is with modern drives however. Drives used to have a single, large diameter platter. Now they are made with several smaller diameter platters, which reduces the speed difference from outside to inside of the platter.

And yes, you can use 2 swap partitions. It only improves performance if they are located on different drives. If you need 2 Gig of swap, two 1 Gig swap partitions located on different drives will be much much faster than a single swap partition. Linux can strip across drives on swap partitions. It is similar to a two disk RAID 0 set-up.

Fred

[big_dog1968]

Fred,
How do I mount my NTFS partition, or any other data partitions in the Home folder. Is there a tutorial somewhere explains this?

[Fred]

big_dog1968,

I don't know that there is a real how-to, but I have explained it a number of times in various posts. To keep you from having to look it up, here is the short version.

Create a folder in your /home directory. As an example, we will call it "NTFS_Data". (no spaces in the folder name)

Open /etc/fstab for editing and put this stanza, corrected for your system of course, in it anywhere, save and close.

That's it. When you reboot you will be able to open the folder in your home and see the contents of that partition.

# /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1 /home/Nice_Dog/NTFS_Data ntfs defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0 2

Hope that helps you.

Fred

[big_dog1968]

Thanks Fred,
I got it to work, but now I have an icon for the drive on my desktop.

Is there a way to do what I just did without having the icon for the mounted drive on my desktop? I plan on doing several partitions as you suggested (video, mp3, pics...etc), and don't want to see them all on the desktop if that is possible.

I don't know that there is a real how-to, but I have explained it a number of times in various posts. To keep you from having to look it up, here is the short version.

I may try to look it up at some point anyway, because although the quick help was greatly appreciated, I also want to learn more about linux. I have dreams of someday being a Fred-like guru myself!

Thanks again.

[Fred]

big_dog1968,

Apparently, It placed a link on the desktop. You should be able to just put it in the trash.

I don't know about the guru part. I am just an old dumb country boy.

Fred

[Husse]

No you can't put it in trash
But open mintDesktop and unmark Mounted disks in Desktop options

[big_dog1968]

No you can't put it in trash
But open mintDesktop and unmark Mounted disks in Desktop options

Thanks Husse, that did it.

[Fred]

Thanks Husse for correcting me.

See Big_Dog, I told you I was just an old country boy.

You should aspire to be more like Husse.

Fred

[big_dog1968]

Fred,
I ran into a hick up when I tried to add more partitions. It defaults to Primary and I didn't realize there was a limit to the number of primaries and then I couldn't figure out how to fix it so I wound up deleting all but XP's partition and starting from scratch this time being careful to select Extended and then adding Logical partitions. It works great now. I even added a couple of extra partitions in case I want to try other flavors of mint or distros without formating my Mint Partition. I took the suggestion and made the data folders NTFS, so now they are shared with XP. Beautiful.

From now on I will think of you as Obee-Fred-Kinobe, because you are the jedi master of partitioning!