Dual booting Ubuntu with 7 Ultimate
 

Couple quick questions:

1. Partition space :: Im looking to get both OS's on a 64GB SSD. Is this do-able? Or will I be too cramped with that size drive?

2. What partition layout is ideal for Ubuntu? I plan on sharing as much as possible between the 2 OS.

Thanks

Well, it is doable but it depends. If you store a lot of music or other media on your SSD then it may be difficult to cram it all on. If not you should be good as I've had both on a 40gb drive once, most of my media stored on the network.

Ubuntu only takes up around 5gb (although I'm pretty sure it's less, that's just what it claims) so on the Ubuntu partition I would recommend at least 10, 30 is recomended for that SSD (by me). if windows was installed first then just shrink windows and plop Ubuntu in whatever free space you made for it. Don't forget swap too.

How I share files is I just keep them on the windows partition and acces them from Ubuntu (Ubuntu reads windows but not vise versa). So I you do this you may want to give windows more of your SSD depending on the amount you will share.

I'm gonna have 4GB shared space on the comp. The SSD is solely for the OS's. The SSD will be blank, so I guess I will give Ubuntu 10-15GB and keep the rest for 7. How much do I need for swap, and does it have to be on the SSD, or can it be on one of the other HDD's?

That configuration should work just fine. For swap I recomend 2gb (or 3gb if you want) of swap space for less than 3gb of RAM or 1gb of swap for more than 3gb of RAM. The swap should work on a different HDD but I've never tried.

Also if you are formatting your storage space for files I recomend using a FAT32 filesystem for the best compatibility between OS's. If your not formatting and is already NTFS, that will work too but FAT32 is better in Linux (don't confuse this, only for file sharing. Ext4 I best for the Ubuntu OS itself). Both FAT32 and NTFS are fine in windows. Just a side pointer.

I have 16GB of ram for the machine, do I still need a 1GB swap?

Also the storage HDD's are all already formatted, NTFS.

Ok, it's probably safe to use no swap then as I cannot see a computer using more than 16gb of ram at a time. If the storage HDD's are already formatted then that's ok.

You haven't installed any OS yet right? If you don't already know this, I would install windows first and then Ubuntu, so the ubuntu bootloader isnt overwritten by the windows bootloader.

Didnt know about the bootloader, I probably would have installed Ubuntu first, thanks for the heads up.

Yeah, if you install Ubuntu first, windows will go in and wipe the bootloader so you can only access windows. Ubuntu keeps the windows bootloader and adds options for It so you can access both, automaticly.

Hope your installations are successful!
And tell me how it goes when your done. I like to know if stuff worked out. :D

Edit: Feel free to ask any more questions, but I won't be able to answer them for a couple of hours.