Partitions, file formats and some other questions

[DoubleHelix747]

Just finished installing Xubuntu on my old laptop (Dell PIII 700 MHz, 256MB RAM, 20GB HDD). This is my first encounter with Linux and I am wondering if I did everything as it should be done:

(1) This laptop will have only Xubuntu as the OS. So I manually created three partitions in the following order -

\ 10GB primary partition, at the beginning of the free space, formatted as ext3
\swap 768MB logical partition, at the end (will probably upgrade RAM to 512MB)
\home 9GB logical partition, at the beginning of the remaining free space

So the question is whether I chose the options correctly (primary vs. logical, location, file system). I have seen conflicting recommendations on the net. However, the system seems to be booting fine so far.

(2) I am going to install Ubuntu on my desktop too. However, on this machine I will have Windows as well. I would like to share the data partition between the two OS. Does this mean I have to create this partition with the FAT32 file system so that Windows can access it ? And how does one reconcile the fact that Linux would look at this partition as \home and Windows as, say, D:\? Or does one need to?

TIA.

 

[n0cmonkey]

1. Looks decent. The separate /home can really help, especially if you have/want to rebuild.

2. FAT32 is an ok choice, NTFS might also be okay (although I wouldn't trust it for /home). Actually, I wouldn't trust either for a /home directory. I'd make the fat partition something like /data or /media instead.

 

[DoubleHelix747]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

2. FAT32 is an ok choice, NTFS might also be okay (although I wouldn't trust it for /home). Actually, I wouldn't trust either for a /home directory. I'd make the fat partition something like /data or /media instead.

Thanks. Since Linux is all Latin to me, a follow up question - if I separate /home and /data, and keep all my data and media files in /data, does that mean I would not be using the /home partition at all? The reason I ask is that in this case can I get away with making /home partition as small as possible (I have only 9GB left after OS and swap).

And re: my desktop that is going to have dual boot - if the data/media in the /data partition is to be shared by Linux and Windows, how does that work? When I boot with Linux, it will appear as /data and with Windows it would appear as, say, E: - is there something that I need to do during installation/partitioning for this purpose.

TIA.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Yeah, I've had systems where I had a really small /home partition.

I don't think you'd have to do anything too special, after you setup a /data (or whatever) partition it should all just work.

 

[Industrial]

While we are on the subject of partitions...can someone help me also?

I haven't done a fresh install in over 2 years, so I forgot most of how to reformat and install. It was (if I remember correctly) 4 primary partitions, 1st winXP, 2nd swap, 3rd *nix, and the 4th was /home. Now I want to create a win partition with 2 partitions, 1 for the system files, the 2nd for data program files. I figured this will keep it somewhat cleaner, faster, and less fragmentation. And keep linux with a separate partition and a /home partition, so when I reinstall Linux, my files in my /home directory will still be there untouched. I also want a storage partition, that I can use while I'm either in Linux or Windows.

Windows
-system partition
-data partition

Swap

Linux
-system partition
-/home

Storage in Fat32

So can some explain, what type of partition I need to create first (primary, logical, extended), and an ideal partition scheme?

Thanks.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Industrial
While we are on the subject of partitions...can someone help me also?

I haven't done a fresh install in over 2 years, so I forgot most of how to reformat and install. It was (if I remember correctly) 4 primary partitions, 1st winXP, 2nd swap, 3rd *nix, and the 4th was /home. Now I want to create a win partition with 2 partitions, 1 for the system files, the 2nd for data program files. I figured this will keep it somewhat cleaner, faster, and less fragmentation. And keep linux with a separate partition and a /home partition, so when I reinstall Linux, my files in my /home directory will still be there untouched. I also want a storage partition, that I can use while I'm either in Linux or Windows.

Windows
-system partition
-data partition

Swap

Linux
-system partition
-/home

Storage in Fat32

So can some explain, what type of partition I need to create first (primary, logical, extended), and an ideal partition scheme?

Thanks.

last install i did, a couple of weeks ago, i did the following on a 160GB HD. these are rough sizes

500mb /boot
60GB Primary Partition as LVM for linux
---/swap 4GB
---/ ~12GB
-----/home ~35GB
-----/var 4GB

remainder for windows (7 beta has a small partition it uses, i guess for the boot partition but i never looked into it)


i installed linux first without intending to install windows...then i found my copy of half-life 2 😉

really itd be easier to install windows first, then linux after that (grub should see windows during the install and add it to the boot list, windows wont be so courteous)

 

[sourceninja]

Honestly, for desktops and non production servers I don't even bother anymore with partition schemes. I typically just do (for notebooks which is all I use anymore)
1.5 to 2 times ram as swap (to allow hibernation) on desktops I usually max my swap around 1 gig
The rest of the drive as /

On my servers I split out /var, /var/log, /home/, and our own private areas we use for our inhouse apps (on a /opt/companyname folder)

 

[graysky]

/ (ext3 or ext4 if using Jaunty) 20 GB
/swap (2 gig of physical = 4 gig swap; 4 gig physical = 4 GB swap)
/home (ext3 or ext4 if using Jaunty) 60 GB
rest of drive as its own partition

Power of this is that if you wanna reinstall LINUX, you just nuke the / and your /home and the rest of the drive is untouched