Partitioning to install Ubuntu plus file storage question

Okay,

So from reading numerous posts here (and doing a few searches) I'm trying to work out exactly what I need to do to install Ubuntu on my machine (for machine setup, I have the Ubuntu CD already).

What I have gathered is that I think I need to create 2 new partitions, one for Ubuntu, and one for swap space (which I assume somewhere in Ubuntu I would specify)

How big does the Ubuntu partition need to be? Right now I'm just looking at needing Openoffice and GIMP (both of which I believe come with Ubuntu)

What about swap file size?

Now, onto files, what format should be used for a drive that I want to be able to access from both Windows and from Ubuntu? How do people normally handle this (for example, where I want my MP3's and Videos and...)

Forgot to mention: Currently my machine is setup with a FAT32 30GB partition for Windows XP (plus programs) and then a 90GB NTFS parition for my data, not sure which I'll make smaller for Ubuntu, probably the FAT32 partition simply because of the amount of free space normally in that partition.

Thanks for any help, still a bit of a newbie, been 10 years since I last really played around with Linux and it was all pre-setup for me there..

 

I think you will need at least 3GB-4GB for Ubuntu, but that gets filled up very quickly, so if you can spare at leas 5GB that would be best. For swap I use about twice as much as I have ram, so 512MB of ram would get a 1GB swap partition.

I will leave the format question to someone more knowledgeable than myself, I think you can get FAT file systems in Linux now, though Its still fairly bata right now from what I have heard.

 

Hmm, you know on swap space, I've never really understood the philosophy behind "twice RAM size", I figure the more RAM I have the LESS I should need swap space, not more (assuming I'm doing about the same number of things).

My Current Windows Setup I have no swap file because with 2GB of RAM windows never runs out of memory.

Can anyone give reasons why I should have a large swap file that slows my PC down?

 

If you have that much ram you MIGHT be able to do away with the swap. You could always give it a try. the worse that could happen is that you might have to reinstall the OS. So why not give it a try, I know there are a few OS' out there that do not require a swap partition because they load entirely from the ram. Theoretically that will give you faster performance.

 

You can refer to my guide in the sig.

 

A one gigabyte swap partition would be suitable. And Linux now has full read/write to FAT32 partitions. You could prolly get away with NTFS, but FAT32 would be safer.

 

I have Ubuntu install in total 80GB HDD share with XP NTFS. I give Ubuntu only 20GB and 1.5G for swap partition.

I almost install all desktop apps, including O-O, lot of multimedia stuffs, Tetex. No games, no databases. Right now, it only takes 5+G space.

You don't need FAT32 partition at all. FAT32 is safe for Linux, but it is not safe for XP. NTFS-3G is pretty safe although they don't claim that. Also you can have IFS reader/writer from XP to access ext3 partition.

 

How do you figure that FAT32 isn't safe for Windows XP? It's one of two file systems officially supported by Windows XP. And, if the makers of NTFS-3G say it can cause some instability, I'd be inclined to heed their warnings.

 

The FAT32 is not that safe vs. NTFS when XP crash down. It is harder to recover lost data from FAT32 than NTFS on my experience. If it is in normal usage, they are about the same. But we all experienced XP blue screen.

NTFS-3G has only one thing that I don't like. When you hibernate from XP and into Linux, 3G doesn't mount NTFS at all(it thought the NTFS is unclean), but ubuntu default NTFS driver can mount that.

Again, the safety issue only rise when you are doing a lot of cross partitions fast read/write, like in database. Backup files are not that critical. I was moving >50G data back and forth, and parsing compressed data from NTFS using Perl in Ubuntu, nothing unstable with it.

 

So it sounds like if I made my "data" drive EXT3 then both windows and Linux can read that so I would be able to access from both places, is EXT3 better or worse than FAT32 in terms of security and such (I know people seem to think that you shouldn't have FAT32 drives if you can have them as NTFS instead)

 

well, you'll need to install the capability to read/write ext3 in windows, but if that's really stable, it might be the best option, as that way you get the benefits of a journaled file system without the potential for instability from the Linux side.

 

Regarding Swap size: Many years ago, when 8MB was considered a 'lot', setting swap to 1.5-2 times your memory was considered good practice for most desktop type machines. For machines with >512MB of memory, the purpose of swap has changed, and its safe to just use a few hundred MB. As memory bandwidth and latencies improve much faster than HDD bandwidths and latencies, the cost of hitting your swap increases, so realitvely speaking, you want less of it (or in linux, decrease the swappiness in your kernel to reduce the likelihood of hitting it).

For laptops, with >=1GB and not-too-fancy desktops, I probably wouldn't even bother with swap unless I had reason to expect I was going to use memory-hog applications

 

Humm, for laptop, you probably need that swap for hibernating.

 

Hibernation can be configured to use a file on the root filesystem, or so I've heard. As far as the swap file size debate goes, I'm currently using ubuntu x64, running gnome, firefox with ~10 tabs open, azureus, a couple other torrents in bittornado, gaim, beryl, a program for monitoring system temps, and have 4 or 5 instances of gedit opened on another desktop. I'm using 510mb out of a gig of ram, and 684mb on a 3gb swap partition (it's a 320gb hard drive, I could afford it). Oh, and the computer has been running all this, with firefox's memory leak and all, for the last 3 days, 11 hours and 48 minutes. So, it does get used eventually, but not much.

 

Yeah, it's always nice to have some swap space there, just incase, but 1GB should be a suitable limit.