Can't load Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit
 

I have tried several times and failing to load Ubuntu onto my new machine which is a AMD64bit processor dual core. It fails to load the guided partition and takes me to manual. There I am stuck as I don't know which is the right way to split the 159 GB's? I know there has to be a swap and two more factors and thats it. So looking to your help please. And as its in bytes that confuse me. GB and MBS fine thats easy (with my morphine brain it is easy to confuse these days).

I have WinXP on 50GB's of the first part of the drive. I have some spare at the end of the drive as well.

I really want to know what the areas I need are as ROOT does not come up on the list of partitions. The list is familiar to you, but not to me, its just a list and the only one I know is SWAP. I think I need 5GB for that?
The list which is..

EXT3 journaling file system
Reiser FS journaling file system
SFS (may have written that wrong) journaling file system
XFS journaling file system
Fat16
Fat32
NTFS
SWAP

So taking that I have 150GB's and not knowing which is which I would assume wrongly I expect that I should do the following

EXT3 journaling file system 35GB's
SWAP 5GB's
NTFS the rest

Now I know you say I am wrong, but at this stage I Haven't done anything to the comp so shall hopefully await for some experienced instruction. Also which one do you mount? I am searching through the mounds of info on the net, but they don't seem to give the information that corresponds to the list. Just states make a swap file, a root file, a home file. The only one I see is the 'SWAP'.

I am glad I didn't take the simple road and try and calculate by moving the decimal point along to get my bytes calculated into GB's. I would be completely wrong!! So why do it in bytes when partitioning??

http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/

1024 Bytes in 1 KB x 1024 KB in 1 MB = 1,048,576.

I know that the simple way it to get the Ubuntu setup to do the job, but it hasn't! I am getting very frustrated not getting or finding the dam answers. All I see is segmenting into root/home and swap!! It does not give me the answer I am looking for. I find that the computer speak world is always like this especially when your head is so full of morphine putting 2 and 2 together becomes a disaster. Frustrated YES. So really am looking forward to hopefully getting Ubuntu functioning very SOON. Sorry I am losing it a bit, but just want to get going. Just sick of reading and reading and not finding the right answers and coming across short explanations that don't really help and jargon.

Thanks

Tony

There isn't a right answer and you don't need to be very close to any best answer.

EXT3 is a good choice for the Linux / partition and you don't really need other Linux filesystem partitions. 35GB is almost certainly more than enough space for it.

5GB is almost certainly more than enough space for swap.

An NTFS partition in the rest of the space is a good way to store any data you want to share between Linux and Windows (If that wasn't its purpose, you probably don't need that partition at all).

When you install Ubuntu, you must direct the installer to put everything it installs in the one EXT3 partition you created. It should also use swap partition you created. I don't know the dialog for the Ubuntu installer, so I don't know exactly where/how you tell it to use existing partitions.

Once Linux is installed and running, you can make sure you have the right ntfs software installed and have the ntfs partition mounted the right way to allow safe read/write of ntfs for sharing data with windows.

You may see advice in various places to partition your home directory, boot directory, or other directories separate from the / partition. But doing so may not be best for you and anyway isn't worth the extra complexity now.

If you do decide to make those separate partitions, your simple choice for each of them is EXT3. Do not make any of them ntfs. NTFS is just for sharing data with Windows.

Thanks for your reply. I did get it going and your answer was very helpful. Thank you

Tony

A 5GB swap is in fact a waste of space. You don't say how much RAM you have, but you almost certainly have more than 1GB, so you're not going to need that much swap (and if you are, you care about performance enough to buy more RAM). I know the "rule of thumb" is 2x your RAM - but these aren't the days of 16MB RAM chips anymore. The only reason for more than, say, 256MB swap on Linux these days for home consumers is if you plan to hibernate - then take a swap 75-100% of your RAM (you can go less with compressions).

A 5GB swap is probably a waste of space.

We don't know how Tony is planning to use his computer, nor how much physical ram he has.

Some systems have a lot of large rarely executing background server processes sitting around. They may need a lot of swap space to get those out of the way to use the physical ram for real work. Some systems have several processes with excessive "Copy On Write" or "Demand Zero" memory allocations, so they may run into commit level problems unless they have far more swap space than will actually ever get used. I would very confidently guess Tony doesn't have either of those issues. But who else might read your advice.

A while back, I did a bunch of testing on an open source program that (among other uses) converts an image from one compression method to another. It was wasteful in its use of memory and would fall back to a much slower file I/O method if it didn't find enough memory. Some of its memory use was pure enough waste that such memory could be swapped out without significant performance impact. So (when converting very large images) it could run far faster with a big swap space than without.

I don't know that Tony won't be using some program like that. Such programs are rare and even within such programs the use cases that trigger such performance anomalies are obscure. So probably Tony's 5GB swap is a waste of space. But I don't know that for sure. Likely using a few of those GB to increase some partition that is already big enough would also be a waste of space. Disk space is cheap. Cutting swap down to the "right" size is a waste of effort.

Except for hibernate, there is little reason for the "right" swap space size to even correlate positively with the amount of ram. So I never supported any of those old "rule of thumb" ideas. But I equally dislike just saying "256MB" as a new rule of thumb. The amount of swap space you need depends on how you use the system. It is hard to predict how much you'll need. As long as disk space is very cheap, the tradeoff is disk space against probability that you allocated too little swap space. A few GB of disk space is often less costly than even a small risk that 256MB isn't enough swap.

For hibernate, I'd like to know. But I've never tried it. What does hibernate to disk actually do? In a typical memory heavy system (mine for sure) almost all of memory is filled with clean copies of file data (file caching plus read only mapping of .so files, etc.). If any of that is pushed out by memory pressure the system can just drop it, knowing where to reread it later if needed. It never would write any of that to swap. Is the same true during a hibernate? Does the system just drop all the clean copy pages when hibernating and reload them on demand from the original source if needed after restart? Or does all that stuff get duplicated into swap space for hibernate?

It all running fine now and as for the analogy, I enjoyed reading it. I have 4GB memory, 3.3GHz Dual core Amd 64bit, 220GB hard drive with 500 external. So loads of space, more than I need as I load all my photographs onto disk. I never trust hard drives!! I only have given Windows 50GB and there is a spare 25GB if it needs it on the main hard drive.
So you see I have more than enough to be generous with. I do editorials on photographic software and teaching workshops for the photographic forum I help run. Also the photographic club I run as well. I do editorials for Gizmo techalert site. And load up Linx OS to keep me busy looking for a stable Linux. But with the new comp I have had to assess it all again as the 64 bit has thrown things a bit.

Thanks

Tony

It varies and I'm not totally clear whether buffers & cache are cleared when you hibernate or not, but hibernate (suspend-to-disk) dumps your RAM to your swap partition (in most configurations), thus the need for a swap the size of your RAM, or less if you enable compression of the image.