Okay so I'm brand new to Linux. My first Linux OS was Crunchbang as of a few days ago. I like it very much. But I figured I might put Xubuntu and perhaps even Fedora on my machine as well, and as soon as I can find someone with a MAK I want to put either Win7 or Win8 on there too. It's a netbook; Atom N2600, but with a 120GB SSD and 4GB RAM. So far with Crunchbang it's been pretty snappy. I can play youtube videos and kongregate games without a hitch.

But that's besides the point, my issue is I don't know ANYTHING about partitioning. Partition-wise here's what's on my SSD so far:

/dev/sda
-----sda1 (ext4) 115,127 MB Size 5876 Used

-----sda5 (swap) 4904 MB 0 Used


Now it seems like I'm supposed to leave swap alone, as that's a backup for RAM, right?

But what about the rest of it? Should I take sda1 and subdivide it, like for instance make a partition called sda2 and put Xubuntu in that, and put Windows in sda3? Or should separate OS's have separate letters altogether, like Xubuntu in sdb and Windows in sdc? I really don't know what's the best way to do this.

And furthermore, what's the best way to go about doing this? Can I use gparted to do this or should I let Xubuntu lead the way as I install it? I tried that way and it gave me the option to install Xubuntu alongside Crunchbang (Debian) and then it asked me to divide up the available space on the SSD, with the default being 57 GB for one half and 57 for the other.

But I didn't know for sure which side would be Xubuntu and which side would be Crunchbang and I didn't know how I'd go about dividing the larger portion further once I needed to install another OS.

Also does every OS need to be in a partition formatted as ext4?

I really just don't understand all this.

I posted a thread over at linuxforums as well. So if you saw the other one I'm not a bot or something I just figured I might as well get as much advice as possible.

I urgently recommend you to do a bit of reading on this topic. Any introductory Linux book has info on partitioning. It helps when you know what you're doing .

Yep.

Yes. You basically have to, because sda is your only storage device (that is, your SSD). There won't be an sdb or sdc on your system unless you add more disk devices.

Any modern distribution's installer includes a partition manager similar to gparted. So you can just install Xubuntu and do the partitioning from inside the Xubuntu installer. Note that you'll have to select "manual partition setup" or similar to be able to create partitions for the other OSs that you want to install. By default, most distros suggest a partitioning scheme that only has partitions for one OS.

As I said, do yourself a favor and read up on this topic, it's really easy once you get into it and it's worth the effort, because it will be difficult to change your partitioning scheme once you have your OSs installed!

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When installying multiple distros i tend to go for creating N small partitions (for / of each distro)
then one large partitian that I usially mount as /mnt/data in all distros,

I then symlink ~/Documents ~/Music ~/Videos etc to /mnt/data/[whatever]

this works slightly better than trying to mount the same /home on various distros as it stops the various distro user config files that are ofthen stored in home from fighting with each other

Stick with Crunchbang, and if you are curious about other distros, run them as a Live USB.

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@ EDDY1

And thanks for all the helpful info so far everyone!

To install another distro you need to free up space from sda1 then add the free space to sda2 which is your extended partition.& install there.
gparted-live cd/usb would do the trick.

Awesome, thanks guys.

One final question, when I make new partitions with gparted am I going to have to pick the format or will that be automatic when I install stuff on it? If I have to pick should I just make everything ext4? If not which partitions should be which formats?

Linux installers usually allow you to format partitions, but you can also pre-format them with gparted, you can do it either way.

Yes, that's a reasonable choice and the default in most modern distros.