On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 19:02:41 -0600 "Howard Coles Jr." wrote:

You could set it up that way, and mount the fat32 partition as /download or whatever in Linux, and d: in XP.

Just make sure you allot enough for Linux to have a separate swap partition, this could either be in an extended partition or primary.

Thanks for the info. Do I actually need to designate this swap partition using partition magic or will the suse installation do this for me when I install on the fat32 partition? If not, how much should I alot for a swap partition? -- Rick

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 20:24:42 -0600 "Howard Coles Jr." wrote:

No, when you shrink the XP partition it will leave empty space. Leave it empty from PM's view point and then install Linux. SuSE will come up with what it thinks is a good idea for partitioning, but I have usually had to go in and change it. The only two partitions you HAVE to create to install SuSE are the swap and / (or root) partitons. Then various Linux people have varying ideas as to how it should be split up from there.

Ok thanks. Are you saying though that just doing the SuSE install of letting it choose a root and swap is fine? What I'm confused about is if I follow some recommendations to set up the other linux partitions /home /boot etc., do I have to do that with PM or am I prompted from within the SuSE install to do this?

Oh, and just a tip, when you reply, just reply to the list, otherwise I get two replies, ;-)

Sorry about that.

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 21:59:56 -0500 Bruce Marshall wrote:

If you are doing the partitioning manually... (using PM) then when you get to the SuSE install and it shows you the partitioning section, you want to 'discard' its suggestions and go to 'expert' mode. (you're an expert aren't you? :-) But seriously, if you've already set up your partitions with PM, then its simply a matter of telling the install which partitions you want to use for /, /boot, /home etc and then telling it to format them. Actually the format would be unnecessary but it will tell you you're a boob for installing on a 'suspect' partition. And the formatting only takes a few seconds anyway.

Don't I still need to know what sizes to make those other partitions though? (/, /boot, /swap, /home ?). I have no clue what percentages of the total space I have for Linux should be for those? Are there any guidelines to follow? Thanks again -- Rick

On Thursday 21 November 2002 23:10 pm, Howard Coles Jr. wrote:

On Thursday 21 November 2002 08:40 pm, Rick Reumann wrote:

...

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 20:24:42 -0600

"Howard Coles Jr." wrote:

...

No, when you shrink the XP partition it will leave empty space. Leave it empty from PM's view point and then install Linux. SuSE will come up with what it thinks is a good idea for partitioning, but I have usually had to go in and change it. The only two partitions you HAVE to create to install SuSE are the swap and / (or root) partitons. Then various Linux people have varying ideas as to how it should be split up from there.

<<< Big Snip>>>

The second thing is as soon as you get SuSE installed make a recovery Floppy. And then, Don't worry, be happy. You can mess up just about every stinking thing and there is usually a way to recover.

One thing people may not know (or remember) is that the SuSE install CD has a 'rescue system' mode on it... so you can boot into a really healthy rescue system just by booting the install CD and selecting the rescue system... (at least it is on the DVD cd) I once had a problem with an Adaptec scsi controller not wanting to work after I had installed sucessfully... (the infamous timeout errors) and I was able to boot into the rescue system and do a kernel compile to fix the problem... Can't get much better of a rescue system than that!

Wonderful thing about Linux. I have blown my machine up so many times (with the previous hard drive) it wasn't funny, but somehow there was a way to straighten out the mess. With Windoze I usually have to completely reinstall, but my last install of SuSE 8.0 had been blown up and recovered at least 8 times! not once did I reinstall :D! I'm pretty happy with it as you can tell, if I could just get my sound card to work properly. I did something, but can't for the life of me figure it out.

...

...

Oh, and just a tip, when you reply, just reply to the list, otherwise I get two replies, ;-)

Sorry about that.

Not a problem with me. Just didn't want you getting in trouble down the road.

-- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 11/21/02 23:59 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "Give me ambiguity or give me something else."

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002 02:17:15 +0100 (CET) Ole Kofoed Hansen wrote:

I hope you don't mean what you are saying here. You really do not want to run Linux from a fat32 partition.

Sorry I guess I meant just make it blank or whatever the default is for a clean empty partition.

A shared fat32 partition is a good idea. The actual sizes of your partitions will depend heavily on the way you use the different OSes. I can't see why it should be any more difficult to set up 3 partitions than 2.

Like someone else on the list mentioned, you also want a swap partition.

What I'm confused about is in the users guide it mentions you can set up separate partitions for /opt, /home, /usr, etc. Do I need to do this? Should I do this? and if so do I use partition magic to do this or do I do this through the suse install on the empty partition? Do I use partition magic to make the swap partition also or will the suse installation ask me? Thanks again

On Thursday 21 November 2002 17:39, Bruce Marshall wrote:

My opinion as a long time Partition Magic user is to:

1) Use partition magic to do all of your partition setups. Don't let the SuSE install do anything but format them.

2) Make partitions for /boot, /home, swap, and '/' (four)

3) The purpose for /home being separate is that you can 'carry it forward' to the next version of <whatever distro> of linux you install.

this is a kind of "yeah, what he said" post, but also attempting to point out the probably-obvious: the point on #3 is the next time you do #1, you DO NOT want to "format" the "/home" partition you built in #2 [see also my response on naming partitions, though perhaps a better thread topic for both of these is "partition types, sizes, and uses" :) ] Tom

On Friday 22 November 2002 03.10, Rick Reumann wrote:

If there is a baby step RTFM guide or something to what I'm going to need to do with partition magic and my suse 8.1 in so that I can keep XP on one partition and Linux on the other

all you need to do with Partition Magic is to shrink your XP partition (if it needs shrinking, that is) and set up the fat32 partition that you intend to use for shared data. Leave the rest unpartitioned, and the SuSE installer will partition it automagically. If you intend to set up separate partitions for /home or other directories, you can do that from the SuSE installer as well. Experience has taught me *not* to use partition magic at all for linux partitions. Anders

On Friday 22 November 2002 03.44, Bruce Marshall wrote:

Hmmmm My opinions are to do just the opposite. Here's what I responded to another person who asked me off list about my partition sizes. (opinions included)

Most of my disks are larger than 20GB with the exception of one machine that has two 18GB disks. I always try to have enough disk space to be able to install two versions of linux, say SUSE 7.3 and 8.0.

When a new version comes along, I *always* do a new install, never an update. I've done that for years... When 8.1 came along I decided "what the H" and did an upgrade... and within a day I was doing a complete re-install of 8.0. 8.1 didn't work for me and if I had followed my own rules, I would have avoided a ton of work. I will never ever update a working installation again. (but I digress)

My update 8.0->8.1 went well. I have upgraded three systems now, and I haven't seen any problems at all. That, to me, was the most impressive aspect of 8.1.

On my 8.0 System:

Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 7131416 3309424 3459728 49% / /dev/sda5 23302 4651 17448 22% /boot /dev/sda10 1002886 361883 589195 39% /ftparea /dev/sdb5 1620736 1073732 464676 70% /home /dev/sdb7 3072383 2285800 627504 79% /vmware SWAP 800MB 49MB

The above is in linux 'df' format which will give you an idea of sizes and of space used but basically:

SWAP on a 768MB ram system I have about 800MB SWAP. Right this minute I have about 49MB used of swap... and that's using KDE, and StarOffice, and VMWARE (about 200mb) and two browsers. So for your use, I doubt if you should have more than that. 500MB would probably do it.

This depends heavily on what you use your computer for. People on this list have talked about video editing and other tasks that could potentially require several gigabytes of swap. On the other hand, on my system with 512MB RAM, and using it for pretty much the same as you (KDE, SO, vmware), I haven't seen a need for any swap at all.

HOME - I have about 1.GB allocated but only 1GB used... and I have a lot of JPEG files on that and also all the files for a web site or three. Start with 1GB or even less.

My /home is 24GB and 95% full :)

ROOT (/) I would try 5GB and 6GB would be plenty. And with Partition Magic, you can modify any of the sizes with no big deal if one of them turns out to be too small.

When I install everything from the SuSE cds (not really everything, but you know...) I end up with about 5.5GB of software on /. You probably want to leave a little extra room for log files, unless you have a separate partition for /var

BOOT - 16MB would be plenty. The original recommendation was for 23...

These days there's no need for a separate /boot at all, unless you have a very old BIOS.

Partition Magic is a good tool.... and over the years I have strictly avoided using the linux tools to make new partitions. Why? Sometimes Linux can move things around in the partition table that upsets the Windows world... In otherwords, Linux can break windows. I've seen it happen. Using PM will avoid this.

My experience has been that partition magic can't be trusted with anything other than windows partitions. I haven't used the latest versions so that may have changed, but the older versions have ruined more than one linux partition for, so I rely on fdisk which has always come through for me

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To each his own... and whatever works for you, use it.

Agreed

On Thursday 21 November 2002 18:10, Rick Reumann wrote:

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 17:59:38 -0800

Tom Emerson wrote:

...

[see also my response on naming partitions, though perhaps a better thread topic for both of these is "partition types, sizes, and uses" :) ]

When you get back from your meeting Tom maybe you'll get this:) Saw that other post and I was lost:)

I see you've added a smiley, so you got my point -- there are a TON of ways of setting up partitions and filesystems for linux (but "fat" is rarely one of them :) ) I've also read the rest of the posts on this, and I see the inevitable question came up: what sizes should I make these? and the inevitable answer(s), starting with: "Then various Linux people have varying ideas as to how it should be split up from there." [Howard Coles] to which I'll throw my two cents into the ring: /boot: this does not HAVE to be very large, BUT with HD sizes increasing daily, "the smallest" you can make it is "one [logical] track", and often "one track" is 20-30MB! There are various reasons for having a separate /boot partition, the most notable having to do with BIOS [begin history lesson] older "boot" code only accessed the system via the BIOS, and BIOS level disk-read calls are limited to 1024 tracks -- modern boot loaders (like linux itself) do not rely entirely on the BIOS, so they can "read" the entire disk. [end history lesson] So, as one person pointed out, with "modern" boot loaders (and/or BIOS's) there is little need for a separate (small) boot partition in the first 1024 tracks, however I'll point out a case where a "small" partition does have it's advantages: if you're running "raid" or "LVM" for your root partition (as I am on one system) you'll probably find it easier to manage if /boot is not part of the "raid" or LVM partitions. The <swap> partition: as noted, this depends entirely upon what you intend to do with your system -- "general workstation work" using KDE, "openoffice", and the like, probably doesn't need much "swap" space (if any) as most "home/small office" systems have relatively HUGE amounts of live ram, and with an (essentially) single-tasking user at the keyboard, very little "swapping" goes on. "specialized" work, such as audio or video editing, will benefit from larger "swap" sizes [as well as more physical memory, which is actually different than windows 98 -- adding "too much" memory to a win98 system actually slows it down!] Systems truly being used as "servers" with multiple processes competing for resources will benefit from larger swap partitions as well. /home: again, this depends on "what you do" with your system. multi-media fanatics will benefit from larger partitions. This includes "Download junkies", e-mail rat-packers, and mp3/avi addicts. [everyone, in unison] "Hi, tom!" seriously, though, as disk prices continue to fall through the floor and "media bloat" continues to rise, bumping this higher than you expect you'll ever need probably won't hurt... /opt and/or /usr/local: (note that mounted partitions don't have to be "at the root level", so it is entirely possible to have "/usr/local" be a separate partition while "/usr" itself remains part of "/") Basically, the purpose of these directories is to house add-on applications that are not part of the "core" operating system. Because these are not specifically related to the OS itself, the case can be made to keep this partition "intact" during an upgrade (like /home), and with a little luck, you can re-install or upgrade the core system without having to re-install the (add-on) applications [the reality of this, however, is that most likely you'll want to install distribution-level-specific versions of the add-on applications anyway, so perhaps this is a moot point...] /var and /tmp: again, your (users's) usage patterns will determine how large these partitions need to be (that is, if you are separating them from "/" in the first place) "it used to be" that filling your "root" partition was a bad thing -- if you've ever done this in windows, you'll know what I'm talking about -- Unix was even more notorious for "having problems" if the root filesystem became "full". HOWEVER, I'm here to tell you I've taken my "root" filesystem down to 24k free (or less) and lived to tell about it [and my "root" filesystem is 16GB!] Turns out I had done something "boneheaded" and started some process that was logging information to "stderr" -- unfortunately, "stderr" in a graphically-based login happens to be the file /var/log/Xfree86.0.log -- eventually it consumed every bit of free space in "/" since I had set this system up as a single partition (including /home AND /root) because I wasn't expecting to do much with it. Even though I was getting strange errors (unable to create files), the system still continued to "operate". When I figured out what was happening, it was a simple matter to switch to runlevel 3 [killing the "X" process], purge the file, and returning to runlevel 5 [restarting X with a new log file] /root: not talked about much, but the above "problem" [filling the HD] is the reason you'll sometimes hear advice on making /root a separate partition (/root is not to be confused with just "/", which when spoken is often referred to as "root") Basically, this is the "home directory" of the "root" user -- by placing it into a physically separate partition, "rogue programs" like the one I started may cause the system to grind to a standstill by filling "/", but you'll still be able to log on as "root" and "do stuff" because you'll have free space in "root"'s home directory. "chrooted" partitions: (a.k.a. "jails") If you plan on isolating a "service" (such as ftp, dns, or your web server) from the "system", you'll be placing the data or work files for said service in what is called a "chroot jail". In a nutshell, "chroot" means "change the root location for a process". From the process's point of view, whatever directory you change this to (by definition, "lower" on the directory tree) is the root directory, or "/". Once changed, it cannot change to anything "higher" [closer to the real "root"] because it cannot "see" anything higher than "/". Physically isolating "chrooted" processes to another partition (or drive!) helps limit any "damage" an intentionally malicious user of the "service" might attempt to commit. / and everything else: by now you've probably realized that I've avoided "hard actual numbers" for partition sizes -- that was intentional -- but when you're done with the above, most everything else will be "part of the root filesystem", so allocate that last (mentally, not physically -- you'll probably want to "physically" allocate "/" early on in the process so that it resides in a particular location of the disk(s) Also, while I've enumerated the reasons for breaking out certain partitions, I'm going to throw it all out the window and claim "using the Microsoft mentality of throwing everything onto C: may be better (for now)". The single overriding factor behind this is "you are new to linux" -- most of my suggestions are along the lines of "your usage patterns will determine the size needed", but until you've actually used the system, you won't know your "usage patterns"! [the ones that aren't are advanced topics anyway -- chroot, for instance...] There is also another topic which I've only alluded to: "LVM", or "logical volume manager" -- this lets you combine multiple physical drives and partitions into a single or "logical" partition. [for win3.1 there was a product called "one big disk" or something like that which does the same thing; also "promise" makes an IDE controller called "fast trak" which can combine physically different disks into "one big disk"] You can also dynamically shrink or grow (logical) partition sizes by removing or adding physical partitions via the LVM, so if you run out of space, you can add another drive and "grow" the partition. Note however this is a very advanced topic [meaning I haven't done enough with it yet to feel comfortable "teaching" it to someone else...]

All I know is on this windows98 machine it was easy with Suse I put disk 1 in and followed some prompts and I was done.

I don't see that this has to be any different for XP, especially if all you do is "shrink" the area taken by XP and [start with] SuSE's "suggestion" on how to partition the rest. [as someone else noted here, "you are an expert, right?" I hope that by the time you've read what I have written here, you'll understand enough to take the "expert" path without fear of a misstep :) ]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002 20:39:37 -0500 Bruce Marshall wrote:

My opinion as a long time Partition Magic user is to:

1) Use partition magic to do all of your partition setups. Don't let the SuSE install do anything but format them.

2) Make partitions for /boot, /home, swap, and '/' (four)

3) The purpose for /home being separate is that you can 'carry it forward' to the next version of <whatever distro> of linux you install.

Ok thanks and what about the partition for a fat32 shared folder and then the partition to condense XP unto (I hopefully won't have to re-install XP). So basically with 40GB how would you recommend I set it up? I won't really need a lot of space on windows since it will mostly be just for games (although I guess some take up a lot of memory). I was thinking 19 windows 6 for shared fat32 (mp3s, and other junk like OpenOffice docs, etc) 15 for linux So then inside the 15 for linux I need to partition them into as you mention above. What numbers should I use for that? Also when I install linux does it know what partitions to put the different stuff on? (I'm too stupid to know what to put in /boot /home etc. so will it do all this for me?). I'm afraid I'm getting in over my head here and tomorrow is not going to be a fun day:) thanks for any more advice. Rick

The 02.11.21 at 20:33, Rick Reumann wrote:

What I'm confused about is in the users guide it mentions you can set up separate partitions for /opt, /home, /usr, etc. Do I need to do this?

No.

Should I do this?

Perhaps :-)

and if so do I use partition magic to do this

No.

or do I do this through the suse install on the empty partition?

Yes.

Do I use partition magic to make the swap partition also or

No.

will the suse installation ask me?

Of course: you need one, so it will say so. To clarify my opinions a litle, or to confuse the issue further O:-) I would also leave some space unpartitioned, so that I can change opinion later - but that's me. Also, I much preffer two HD. A /home partition is very handy: in case you need to reinstall, you don't loos your data. Partitions like /opt are an option, but you don't really need them till you know you need them. I mean, not for a first install. The only _required_ partions are "/" and swap. The rest, are extra. I wouldn't use partition magic to partition linux partitions because then you leave less options to the Suse installer (less liberty of choice, if you like). Also, linux moves so fast that there may be new formats PM knows nothing about (reiser 3.6, f.i.). -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

The 02.11.22 at 15:05, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:

himm why not use LVM makes adjustments easier (atleast in my case)

Because I haven't ttied it yet O:-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson