Considerations before you install

[teaumaz]

Maybe a silly question, but I just partitioned like this on my 40 gig harddrive

/ -> 10000
/home -> 28000
/swap - 2000

Are there really compelling reasons to put my swap first? Apologies if this has been answered already before. I read this topic and read that partitions on the outside are faster than partitions on the inside (bottom of the list). Is that the reason?

Basically, should I redo my installation, or am I good to go the way it is at the moment?

[thetank]

I tried to do this but mint wouldn't install... seems it will only work with auto partioning and formating

[tawan]

Are there really compelling reasons to put my swap first? ... I read this topic and read that partitions on the outside are faster than partitions on the inside (bottom of the list). Is that the reason?

Basically, should I redo my installation, or am I good to go the way it is at the moment?

that is the reason but there is not much need to reinstall unless you depend heavily on swap and notice a speed issue. If you have plenty of ram then swap will barely get used.

if you want to redo it then yes swap first is to place it on the faster part of the disc.

[switch-blade]

I have read all the posts, and I understand much better what's going on. But I have a question about hidden folders. Can I make a separate partition for the hidden ".mozilla-thunderbird" folder?

Every time I have to install/reinstall a linux distro, I copy the contents of this folder (I have lost my wife's email data more than once). Doing this is a hassle. Would it work to make a separate partition for this data? Or would this data get overwritten (separate partition or not)?

[Husse]

switch-blade

That's how I have it - rather in my data folder which is a partition mounted in home I have a folder which contains the profile for Thunderbird.
When you make a fresh install you have to use the profile-manager to use the old profile folder - google for thunderbird and profile-manager and you'll find info on how to do it

[switch-blade]

Thanks for the reply Husse. I the intervening time, I was googling for some solutions (possibly on other forums). I found this page on the Mint wiki. It talks about changing the profile.ini file in the (hidden) .mozilla-thunderbird folder to point to the copy in the Data folder that you create during the process.

It wasn't much of a stretch for me to figure out that I could make a folder (which I called "tbird") in my /home/x/ directory. I copied the data from /home/x/.mozilla-thunderbird to /home/x/tbird, and I changed the profile.ini in /home/x/.mozilla-thunderbird to use the data in /home/x/tbird/.mozilla-thunderbird -- which has an original copy of the .ini file that points the data in the newly created directory. I then made a copy of the modified .ini file so that when I do a fresh install, I can copy the modified .ini back to the fresh /home/x/.mozilla-thunderbird folder.

Once I move my newly created tbird folder to its own partition, I won't have to copy this data anymore.

This is great because the biggest annoyance with fresh installs is copying data, and restoring Firefox and Thunderbird. I have a handle on FF via extensions that back up my settings. Now TB won't be an issue. Sweet!

Of course I could make my life even more simple by getting my wife to use web-based mail instead of TB -- but she's not amenable to that...

[Husse]

And I don't trust web based mail one bit - all your personal correspondence collected somewhere you have absolutely no control over, and in many cases (hotmail gmail) in the US which as a government that could block anyone's access in the name of the war against terror or some such
But perhaps I'm overly paranoid

[gychang]

What an interesting thread!

Fred, you said in one of the posts that one could leave some space unallocated and then add it to another partition when the need arises... am i right?

how do we do this?

for explanation's sake... lets say we have a hardisk partitioned like so

sda1 - swap - 1GB
sda2 - / - 8GB
sda3 - / 20GB
sda4 - unallocated - 10GB

now if / is full and we need more space how can we add the unallocated space to / ? or only part of it...?

exact question I had...

gychang

[Fred]

gychang and Shane,

Usually you would not be trying to increase the size of the root partition, if your data stores are isolated either in a separate /home partition or in one or more data partitions. Data is the thing that is hard to forecast, which grows and grows and grows. Your program complement can be reasonably forecast and planned for when laying out the partitioning in the beginning. So this would be a rare need.

Having said that, if you need to do what your example demonstrates I would suggest you use the latest stable version of the Gparted live cd iso partitioning program. We need to make a couple more assumptions here to make it complete. We will assume the first 3 partitions are primary partitions with the 10 Gig. being unallocated.

sda1 - swap - 1GB
sda2 - / - 8GB
sda3 - / 20GB
unallocated - 10GB

With Gparted you can shrink or grow partitions. Let's say you wished to add 5 Gig to the root partition. You would add 5 Gig of the unallocated space to sda3. You would then shrink sda3 by 5 Gig. putting the new unallocated space between sda2 and sda3. You would then grow sda2 by the 5 Gig of unallocated space now located between sda2 and sda3. Viola, your root partition is now 5 Gig. larger than when you started.

Please note that if you are using UUIDs, they will have changed on sda2 and sda3, so they will have to be corrected in your /etc/fstab file. Also, don't expect to accomplish this task in 5 or 10 min. The time required to do this depends on how much data you have on sda3, the speed of the hard drive, and the amount of installed RAM.

Fred

[piratesmack]

Fred:
Finally got around to reading this whole thing.

Great info, thanks!

Your second partition method with separate data partitions sounds like a good idea. I think I'm going to reinstall my OS and do something similar.

[fAnTA]

This post looks informative but still doesn't really mean much to me can you go one level back? i.e. trying to explain it to your grandmother or something? not that I'm not PC savvy, I'm just not Linux savvy at all, I know more about Swahili than swap partitions

Yes my intention is to learn as much as I can so I know what I'm doing and the best methods etc, I have toyed with the idea of installing linux for a long while then I heard about Mint and being able to install initially via windows. Great idea! although I've hit an iceberg after the install process, I guess I'll post in a separate post

[Fred]

fAnTA,

Yes please post in a new thread. Go ahead and think of any questions you might have. The only stupid question is the one that isn't asked.

I will do my best to try to enlighten you to the best of my ability.

Fred

[srkelley]

Thanks Fred, you've taught me a lot. Is it possible to make these partitions after a system has already been installed? I think separating the files and folders after install may make the system unuseable, I'm n9ot sure, but if it's possible to make up for my mistakes then I would love to.

[Fred]

srkelley,

It is hard to say what can be done with your system at this point. If you are space constrained and you have lots of data, then depending on what you currently have it could get rather complicated. As a general observation it is usually better to wait until you need to do something to your system anyway, like an upgrade to a later version and/or changing or adding a hard drive, and then rebuild your system from scratch.

Fred

[srkelley]

Wouldn't a new "/" partition need to be created for each distro, or is it somehow possible to have multiple distro's installed to one "/" partition?

I'm guessing no since os specific stuff is saved there and there would/could be conflicts right?

[Husse]

is itsomehow possible to have multiple distro's installed to one "/" partition?

No!
That said I think scorp123 once stated it is possible, but not worth the while and needs great skill (way over my head )

[dlkreations]

Amazing thread. Thank you to all the contributors for such an informative thread. I do have a question for Fred regarding his suggestions for 32 bit systems and swap space allocation: Does your above philosophy apply to 64 bit installations as well?

I am running the x64 version of Felicia, and I followed this thread as well. So when I created my swap, I only used 256MB for it. I am running with 4GB of ram, and so far, I have had no hiccups with performance. I went as far as creating separate partitions for each of my Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos and Downloads, just for the sake of when Felicia x64 becomes final, I won't have to worry about re-doing everything.

Thanks as well for an amazing and informative thread!

[dlkreations]

Thanks for that dlk. So now I have set up my partitions and set up their mount points. I have another question:

When I installed x64 Felicia 6, by default...all of those directories that the partitions were mounted on (/usr, /var, /opt, /home/illus/documents, etc....) their permissions were set to root by default. Owner is set as root, folder access create and delete files, and group was set as root as well. Is this correct? Should I change all these permissions to my user so I don't have to access them as root all the time? My real concern is compromising security.

I have already gone and changed all the permissions to my user...but I just wanted to come here and make sure I did the right thing, or perhaps to see if I did the wrong thing by changing the permissions.

Thanks in advance.

I had to change the permissions on those partitions myself, but to be honest I don't know about the security part of it, as I am pretty much new to this myself. But if you set the permissions just for your user and you do not share the computer with anyone else, I am sure you will be fine, as the permissions will be available to your user only.

Maybe someone with more experience can answer this question better.

[darco]

Amazing thread. Thank you to all the contributors for such an informative thread. I do have a question for Fred regarding his suggestions for 32 bit systems and swap space allocation: Does your above philosophy apply to 64 bit installations as well?

I am running the x64 version of Felicia, and I followed this thread as well. So when I created my swap, I only used 256MB for it. I am running with 4GB of ram, and so far, I have had no hiccups with performance. I went as far as creating separate partitions for each of my Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos and Downloads, just for the sake of when Felicia x64 becomes final, I won't have to worry about re-doing everything.

Thanks as well for an amazing and informative thread!

Since no one from the LM team replied to quote above on whether the swap amount pertains to the 64 bit system, I am going to follow dlkreations advice.
thanks
darco

p.s. I have 4gigs of memory

[Husse]

Since no one from the LM team replied

We have to know there is something to reply to
When the installed RAM is pretty large (I don't want to start an argument about the size ) which is what should be the case if you use a 64-bit system, swap becomes more or less irrelevant
However I have read on more than one occasion that Linux wants to have a swap so a "pro forma" swap of say 256 MB should be ok
The code in the 32 and 64 bit versions is basically the same (apart from the obvious difference)