Recomended partition size?

So I've tried Ubuntu 11.04 64bit using the windows installer. It was interesting to mess around with and only gave me headaches, lol, but I still like it. When I upgrade from Vista to Win7 I want to make a partition for Ubuntu. How much should I partition?

I have another question. I've read that some people use Linux and Wine to run old windows software that they can't get working on new windows OS's. I attempted to use Wine to install an old Windows 98 game but didn't know how or what to do to install it. Second thing is that it uses two CD's which I think was part of the issue. (I've already tried running in VMware on 98 and XP but video driver support is minimal, I don't own an XP computer to run it and don't want to boot up the 12 year old Win98 machine even though it does work).

Thanx!

 

A minimal installation uses only around 2 - 3 GB, if you install some office, productivity and other such tools - you might end up using another 3 - 4 GB. I'd say somewhere between 10 - 15GB should be ideal given that the price per GB is so cheap these days. Having a swap partition is upto you, allocate a swap partition if you seem to be low on RAM or may be running virtual machines from linux.

Wine emulation works for quite a lot of software but not all. Off late wine's dev and support has slowed down as well.

If you're trying some DOS based games like PoP classic, BioMenace or something of that sort there is always DOSBox - which is a Linux app which can run most of your legacy DOS based games smoothly

 

I have no clue what you're talking about in regards to RAM or swap partition. As for price per GB, I have no clue why that is an issue in this case.

No DOS games, just one Windows 98 game.

So, 15GB minimum. So if I partitioned off 20GB of my HDD, I should never have any lack of storage issues.

 

Yup..you should be ok as far as HD storage for your usage....that also depends on how much you will be using for linux and what for. For example, if you plan on using it as a main OS...and you put lots of music/pics/documents and more games you would want more space...but in your case it sounds like you will be using windows as your primary,yes?

 

Ya, I'm Windows all the way. It'd be for recreation use and if I found something that it served better purposes on. My media is definitely in windows since I rely on formats like WMA Lossless.

 

Why would one do that if there is FLAC?

 

Because FLAC doesn't work for what I need. I have an Xbox 360, I often wirelessly stream music from my laptop. I also have a Zune 8GB and Windows Phone 7 which my Zune software can convert the WMA Lossless into a smaller bit rate file in the background when syncing. I'm not going to rip music to multiple formats or convert them to multiple formats. I can basically choose MP3 or WMA and since WMA is my only Lossless option, I choose it. Also, there is nothing wrong with the format, the quality is incredible. I did a test vs CD with audiophile grade Sennheisers and I couldn't notice a difference.

 

Well, it's proprietary - apparently for no good reason.

The quality isn't incredible. It's a lossless codec, so it's supposed to be at the same quality level like the uncompressed source, just like any other lossless codec too.
If you'd notice any difference nevertheless, you should change your player (or the codec) because especially WMA/L is known to cause trouble because not every player can include all the quirks WMA/L comes with. Which brings us back to the problem of being proprietary again.

 

Swap partition was necessary for the older slower machines with low RAM, but now it has become optional.

I told about the price per GB because very high capacity (in excess of 1 TB) hard drives are pretty common these days for desktops and so allocating a few extra GB for a linux partition is not gonna set you back a lot for other stuff you may do in Windows.

Yeah pretty much any lossless audio codec should be good but compatibilty with other devices is something you need to consider based on your application.

Except for properietary embedded platforms like XBox, Windows Phone and all other such stuff - you'd find good cross-platform support for FLAC compared to WMAL - this is what debguy is referring to as well.

Compression wise I havent had time to analyze nor read any such statistics on the internet - so I cant give an opinion on this.

Future-proof is one more thing to go with FLAC - Windows, Apple and all such companies can change their DRMs to be stricter with respect to copying, streaming and lot of other applications any time in their future and they'd expect the players which support WMAL to adhere to the same - and there starts your problem with proprietary formats. Honestly this is one reason why I'd tend to stay away from these formats/codecs - but that is just me. You make your own decision based on what your application is.