Best way to set up Ubuntu partitions?

Hey guys, i need some help on setting up my new harddrive, so i've decided to do dual boot win7/ubuntu this time because i just got a new hard drive and doing a fresh install, i've only booted from USB stick before this, im not sure whats the best way of setting up the partitions, mainly where to put the partitions or does it not matter?

anyways... the HDD is 500GB, i allocated 100GB to win7 system, and i have the rest still unallocated... so the question is...

1. is it a good idea to install ubuntu right after that or is it better to install it at the end of the drive after the storage space?

2. how big should the ubuntu install be? is 20GB+4GBswap too much? (4gb ram laptop)

3. i keep hearing about this Extended Partition, i probably dont need it but what are they for

Thanks

 

1. Ideally yes, but don't worry about it.

2. The OS will fit in there but what about data etc? There are many ways of partitioning, but if you haven't installed linux before I'd be inclined to keep all your data on one much larger partition. So much depends on whether you want to access the same data with different OSs.

3. You can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions, but the 4th one can be an extended one containing several logical partitions.

The best way to answer these questions is to have a go and learn from it.

 

my partitions look like this on a 320gb drive:

[150gb ntfs windows][20gb /root ext3][120gb /home ext3][8gb swap]

basically 3 partitions for linux.
/root for OS
/home for my files
2x amount of ram for swap.

 

20GB for / is pretty much if you separate your home partition. I have 10GB set up on my main system and more or less half of it is empty.
The swap = 2 x RAM equation makes not much sense nowadays. It's a relic from times when 512MB of RAM was huge. In most situations you won't need any swap at all, especially if you have lots of RAM. If you don't use real RAM-demanding applications (you usually know that if you do) the only reason for a big swap partition is suspend to disk. But in this case the equation looks more like swap = RAM + ε.

 

debguy....if one has 8 gigs of ram, like my precision, what swap would you use for hibernation purposes?

 

Personally, I separate out a storage partition that both Windows and Linux access that ends up sitting between Windows and Linux. It's easier to recover files off a distinct partition than to break access controls to get to your own files in case your OS partition gets borked for whatever reason.

 

i figured i needed at least as much GB for swap as my RAM for hibernation, 2x seems excessive however

 

If hibernation is the only actual reason for you to have 8GB swap at all, the equation stays the same: swap = RAM + ε; where ε might be 1GB or 100MB or even only 1MB

My old laptop has 3GB of RAM and the only situations where I needed my 3GB swap partition for anything else but suspend to disk were when I edited huge pictures which were more than 3GB in size uncompressed.

 

Had ubuntu on single partition nothing else, had it on 1 partition + swap, atm got main partition + partition for home dirs + swap.

I see no difference at all, so I say it doesn't matter.

And why no swap .. max usage I saw was 0.2%

The only reason home is on diff partition so that my win7 can access it and do whatever without able to do dmg to ubuntu system.

 

debguy made valid points, and the other posters offered good insights. However, if you are exploring Linux and are installing Ubuntu 10.10 (which will present a diagram of the disk partitions), the easiest way is to create 2 Linux partitions within the newly vacated disk partition:

1. a physical partition for swap, with size = RAM + "extra"
2. a physical partition for /, which will be the place for everything, size = remainder

On single-boot Linux machines, I just let Ubuntu installation does (1) and (2) automatically on the entire disk.


Edit: Some previous information here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/lin...efore-i-make-leap-into-linux.html#post6872104

 

My point...if you have a laptop, you're probably gonna want to hibernate, so do the swap per above

 

A good point!

By the way, Ubuntu installation refuses to let you "Forward" unless you have created the swap partition.

 

What?!
Debian gives you a warning in this case and I know that Ubuntu 8.04 did the same, but you could override that. There's nothing wrong in having no swap partition if you know what you're doing. Therefore not letting you proceed without a swap partition is pretty patronizing.