New to Linux, how should i partition it?

[Hanzou]

I am about to install Mandrake on my 13GB of available space on my HD. I know it is not a lot of space, but I am just fooling around with Linux, If i find godd use for it, I will get another HD and do a full install of Linux. So to my question, I know how to go about partitioning it, but what size should I make my partitions? where should I mount them? what type of file systems should I use? Note that I also have 1 Gb of ram, so do I even need a swap ? thnx for the help!

 

[smp]

You always need a swap.
I would create one partition for swap, and one for the rest. I have been using linux for a few years now and this is still the way I do it, granted, I'm still a newb 🙂
Anyways, not too sure how much swap you should allocate your system cause of 1 gig of ram, generally, the rule of thumb is to make it twice as big, but I don't think that will do, so I'll let someone else answer that.
Filesystem? ext3

 

[Hanzou]

I would create one partition for swap, and one for the rest

What do you mean by "one for the rest"? I have also heard of using 2 times your memory, but with 1Gb of memory, might only need like a 500Mb swap.

 

[Nithin]

If you go through the install process, it should have an option for automatically partition. red hat does, not sure abuot mandrake. perhaps it has as well.

 

[Hanzou]

Mandrake does have an automatic partition but I don't know how good it will be seeing as the limited space I have to work with.

 

[Kadarin]

Originally posted by: Nithin
If you go through the install process, it should have an option for automatically partition. red hat does, not sure abuot mandrake. perhaps it has as well.

Mandrake does. It'll automatically partition for you. Otherwise, for a typical n00b install, you could set up a 32M boot partition, mounted at /boot, a 512MB swap partition, and the rest as root, mounted at /.

 

[Kadarin]

Originally posted by: Hanzou
Mandrake does have an automatic partition but I don't know how good it will be seeing as the limited space I have to work with.

It should work fine.

 

[JustMike]

Originally posted by: Hanzou
Mandrake does have an automatic partition but I don't know how good it will be seeing as the limited space I have to work with.

13GB is more than enough for even the most full Linux installation...

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: smp
You always need a swap.
I would create one partition for swap, and one for the rest. I have been using linux for a few years now and this is still the way I do it, granted, I'm still a newb 🙂
Anyways, not too sure how much swap you should allocate your system cause of 1 gig of ram, generally, the rule of thumb is to make it twice as big, but I don't think that will do, so I'll let someone else answer that.
Filesystem? ext3

Actually you don't need a swap. It's nice to have of course, diskspace is cheap and a extra 500megs of space is fine, but..

The requirement for a swap was built into the 2.2 series kernel, the 2.4 kernel the swap is optional. Of course if you have mondo memory requirements a swap is mandatory, but with 1 gig of ram I REALY don't think you have anything to worry about. 🙂

But to be safe, a 500 meg swap space is fine. Actualy 256 megs is more then enough, your apps will start to be unbarebly slow before you run out of swap space.

The old saying do twice your ram was back when people were running X on OSes with as little as 16 megs of space and that probably was the "magic" formula to take advantage of the memory algorithims and all that stuff. But today this doesn't matter so much... could you imagine paging over a gig of swap space? It make your computer feel like a 486.

The good thing about Linux and ram is that Linux does a good job of using ALL the ram. As you use your computer you'll see the ram usage go up and up and up and up. In win98 this spelt disaster, but in Linux it is a good thing. The more of your OS and most used applications you can keep in memory, the better. If you don't have to access the HD to get info the quicker your stuff will respond and the more stable you get. Memory is probably 10,000 faster then the fastest HD.


For partitioning. Go like this: swap=500MB, /=6GB. Thats' all you realy need. You could do a full install and still have close to 3 gigs of disk clear. If you are planning to use it perminately instead of just trying it out, give your self a /home partition, so that you can reinstall, and/or upgrade with out losing all your user-specific settings.(stored in /home/yourname/ folder in hidden files. Putting a dot before a file hides it. To see these files do a: ls -ld ~/.* command)
something like swap=500MB /=6GB /home=3+GB

And that should do it.