Planning To Install Dapper Drake

crash_override_me · 06-15-2006, 12:12 PM

hi guys,,

i am planning to install Dapper on PC

I need some help on how shud i partition my 9 GB Free Space in a nice & efficient way, so that my Dapper Experience is really Sweet...!!

please help!!

aysiu · 06-15-2006, 01:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by crash_override_me

hi guys,,

i am planning to install Dapper on PC

I need some help on how shud i partition my 9 GB Free Space in a nice & efficient way, so that my Dapper Experience is really Sweet...!!

please help!!

You don't need to partition it. Just select the option to erase the entire hard drive. Ubuntu will automatically set up a root and swap partition for you.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installing.html

crash_override_me · 06-15-2006, 01:57 PM

thanx Aysiu,

but are the 2 partitions /root & swap good enough for a nice installation.
DO i also need some other partitions???

brianthegreat · 06-15-2006, 02:01 PM

All other partitions needed are created within the /root partition by default.

crash_override_me · 06-15-2006, 02:11 PM

My Entire Hard Disk is 40 GB.
I already have Win 98 & XP installed on my PC.

Therefore, i want to use only 9 GB for Ubuntu...!!
So, shud i edit the Partition table manually??

brianthegreat · 06-15-2006, 02:45 PM

Yes you should have to preform that function.

crash_override_me · 06-15-2006, 03:13 PM

i also want to share my Music & Video Files between Windows & Linux.
Shud i make a separate /home for that??

IBall · 06-16-2006, 01:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by crash_override_me

i also want to share my Music & Video Files between Windows & Linux.
Shud i make a separate /home for that??

No.

I suggest that when you come to partitioning the hard drive, you do so manually. The partition tool is quite straightforward. Basically, you will need one swap partition, formatted swap. The size of this should be 2x your ram, up to 1GB. You will need a good 5GB (min) for / which you should be formatted as ext3. The rest, if you want to share music between Linux and Windows should be FAT32. You will need to manually create a mount point for it, say /media/music.

Having said that, you may well be better off buying a new hard disk, if possible. That way, you can devote the entire thing to Linux, and a share partition for your media. Even 9GB is not really enough for a full distro install, you will probably end up running out of space. If you do this, then create a separate /home partition. That way, if you reinstall your distro you don't lose your data.

Whatever you decide to do with your media partition, you will need to change the permissions of /media/music so that it can be read and written by your linux user. Make sure it is FAT32, so that Windows can read and write it as well.

So in summary:
Buy a new disk, say 100GB.
1 GB Swap
20 GB /
50 GB /home
30 GB /media/music

I hope this helps
--Ian

koobi · 06-17-2006, 05:06 PM

i'm on ubuntu (breezy) and this is what my partitioning scheme looks like:

Code:

$ df -Th
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3     ext3    1.8G  307M  1.4G  19% /
tmpfs        tmpfs    221M  8.0K  221M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs        tmpfs    221M   13M  209M   6% /lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/volatile
/dev/hda5     ext3    4.6G  4.2G  245M  95% /home
/dev/hda1     ntfs    7.1G  4.2G  2.9G  60% /media/hda1
/dev/hda6     ext3    6.5G  3.8G  2.4G  62% /usr
/dev/hda7     ext3    2.8G  677M  2.0G  26% /var
/dev/hda9     vfat    4.7G  641M  4.1G  14% /media/hda9
/dev/hda10    vfat    4.7G  3.1G  1.6G  66% /media/hda10
/dev/hda11    vfat    6.8G  6.6G  175M  98% /media/hda11
/dev/hda2     vfat     17G   11G  6.8G  61% /media/hda2
/dev/hdd1     vfat    9.6G  9.1G  529M  95% /media/tmp/hdb1
/dev/hdc   iso9660    697M  697M     0 100% /media/cdrom0

i doubt you'd ever need more than 1GB for / but i've allocated around 2GB.
i always make it a point to seperate /usr and /var because /usr can fill up everytime you install new programs and i'd rather isolate it and /var can fill up with logs/mails, etc.

IBall · 06-17-2006, 09:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by koobi

i doubt you'd ever need more than 1GB for / but i've allocated around 2GB.
i always make it a point to seperate /usr and /var because /usr can fill up everytime you install new programs and i'd rather isolate it and /var can fill up with logs/mails, etc.

Having /usr and /var on separate partitions makes sense on a server. However, on a desktop it is not really necessary.

--Ian

aysiu · 06-17-2006, 10:17 PM

The only useful separate partition I've found to have is /home partition or at least a data one.

crash_override_me · 06-18-2006, 10:11 AM

if i make a separate /home partition.. what r the advantages???
Like, if sometimes later i re-install Ubuntu..., how will the separate /home help me??

koobi · 06-18-2006, 01:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IBall

Having /usr and /var on separate partitions makes sense on a server. However, on a desktop it is not really necessary.

--Ian

but what if you had your /var on the same partition as /root, for example and you used sendmail and you got mail bombed and it filled up your partition? i know that will rarely happen but it is a possibility right? or am i wrong there? i'm still relatively new to linux. i just read that somewhere a while back.

Quote:

Originally Posted by crash_override_me

if i make a separate /home partition.. what r the advantages???
Like, if sometimes later i re-install Ubuntu..., how will the separate /home help me??

as far as i know, /home contains your user specific settings.....so it would contain your desktop folder as well as the settings for the programs that you use (eg: .bashrc, .vimrc, gnome/kde settings etc) for your user only.
so if you wanted to reinstall ubuntu, you could format and reinstall over everything except /home and just mount that once you're done and you will have a fresh install with your old settings.

IBall · 06-18-2006, 09:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by koobi

but what if you had your /var on the same partition as /root, for example and you used sendmail and you got mail bombed and it filled up your partition? i know that will rarely happen but it is a possibility right? or am i wrong there? i'm still relatively new to linux. i just read that somewhere a while back.

I guess that is a possibility - that is why /var may be a good idea on a server. On a desktop, if you are running Sendmail then why is it connected to the outside world? This could be a security risk. I think it is more likely that separate partitions for /var and /usr will end up being more of a pain than a help.

Quote:

as far as i know, /home contains your user specific settings.....so it would contain your desktop folder as well as the settings for the programs that you use (eg: .bashrc, .vimrc, gnome/kde settings etc) for your user only.
so if you wanted to reinstall ubuntu, you could format and reinstall over everything except /home and just mount that once you're done and you will have a fresh install with your old settings.

Yep. It also contains all of your documents, music, etc.

--Ian

bigjohn · 06-22-2006, 02:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by crash_override_me

if i make a separate /home partition.. what r the advantages???
Like, if sometimes later i re-install Ubuntu..., how will the separate /home help me??

I dunno about the stuff the others are arguing about, but the bonus of having a seperate /home is that any personal data you generate is left intact when you install a different distro etc. Sure any customisation might be lost - some of the packages might live in the main system i.e. icon sets, backgrounds etc or they might not actually be supported by the other distro so you'd end up with the defaults, but it's that mega list of email addresses and other address book stuff that lives in the /home that you'd need to protect.

The idea being that when you install a new distro, you tell the installer to use the existing partitions, but NOT to reformat the /home. This method has worked a number of times for me - the only time it's caused any hassle, has been with SuSE, but the info I wanted to keep has always been recoverable (it worked fine with Mandriva, Gentoo, Knoppix Hard drive install, kanotix and now Kubuntu).

The other idea might be to get your hands on a second hard drive and use that for linux, but still put the bootloader on the first section of the MBR on the first hard drive so that the bootloader can see all installed OS's and offer you the choice of what you want to boot at a given time.

The idea of having seperate / (root), /swap and /home would still hold true.

As for switching OS's and still be able to get hold of/access to your music, well as I understand it, the easiest way of accomplishing that is to have a seperate partition again, formatted as windows/FAT 32 - both XP and Linux can write to it (caveat - make sure it's formatted as Windows FAT32, because if it's formatted as Linux FAT 32 the XP will not see it - I had that before and it caused me no end of grief - it was one of the reasons that I ditched windows completely - though it was my f**k up for not paying attention when making the partition for the music in the first place).

Oh and 9 gigs free space isn't a lot of room for /, /swap, /home and a FAT 32 music partition. I think that if I was intending to do what you appear to want, then I'd be looking toward a second hard drive for the linux stuff and the spare 9 gigs on the windows hard drive would end up as the FAT 32 partition.

regards

John