Ubuntu Partition

I recently purchased a new laptop with a 250GB Hard Drive. I have Windows Vista Home Premium. I would like to dual boot with Ubuntu. How large would you recommend making the linux partition? I should mention that I only have 187GB of Hard Drive space left. Where it all disappeared to is a mystery to me.

-Lily

 

Hi, Ubuntu needs less than 10GB to run, however, if you were going to install programs, and listen to music and such, i would recommend 20GB to be safe. There are some great games, photo software, openoffice etc..

You need to remember to create a Swap partition, which should be twice the size of your RAM--ONLY IF, you have less than 2GB of RAM. If you have 2GB of RAM, or more, then you'll be safe with a Swap partition of 512MB, or even not making one at all.

 

How many partitions does the laptop have now? Some of the manufacturers have taken up the annoying habit of clogging the HDD with four primary partitions, making it more complicated to partition for Linux.

 

20 gb all up is fine but if you wish to use it as a main os then upto 50 will give you some great storage space...

if you have less than 1 gb ram, then you will require swap, matched in size, ie 512mb ram, 512mb swap...
if you use 3 x partitions and set one to /home, then use 10gb for / and the rest for /home..


if your hard drive says 250gb, then it is more likely to be 250, 000, 000, 000(approx) which is less than 250 gb, as 250 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 equals 250 gb but they use the american billion figure instead of the correct one(sorry, political statement here, just a scam started long ago to sell drives of lessor size, not american (well dont think so) just a manufacturers idea)...

 

I have a 250 gig HD also and what I have done is basically relegate Vista to a gaming partition....I have about 100 gigs to linux, 55 to my /home partition where my virtual machine, doc's, etc reside, 2 to swap, and the rest to /. I have Reiserfs for my / partition, ext3 for my /home partition.

This is probably extreme for you, but I spend all my time in linux. I'm using Ubuntu btw, have tried many, but came back for ease of use and compatibility with my hardware.

Just trying to give you another scenario....I'll change laptops before I ever run out of space....I've probably got way too much in / btw, but I've got a mapped 500gig network ext HD also.

I would shrink down the Vista partition in Vista to what you want it, then install ubuntu on the free space. If you install VirtualBox and something like XP in the VM, you can pretty much do anything you want without ever leaving the linux partition, which is the idea for me

 

you don't have to make the ubuntu partition large as it will read NTFS quite well. you can give it 3-5 GBs and use the 'vista' partition as your data partition.

 

Reading NTFS will be ok, but writing wont.

If you end up using linux as main os, i'd suggest, as you have alot of space, giving it 50gb or so. I was fooled with the 'low space is ok' and had to try to resize my 10gb linux partition later cuz it got full in less than a month (on which i wasn't successful, then i had to format it again)

Even if you dont plan on using it as main, i'd say dont give it less than 20gb or so

 

totally untrue.

ubuntu (7.10) will read, write, blah blah blah wahtever you want with NTFS.

don't post misinformation

 

To be fair, reliable support for writing to NTFS is relatively new, unless you jumped through some hoops and usef ntfs-ng.

That being said, most newer distros handle reading/writing more or less 'automagically'.

 

Well, i know there are ways to deal with ntfs writing. Actually, yeah, i didn't know it had advanced this far! just googled it and looks pretty accessible to me. Anyway i would still make the linux partition itself. Can you install linux stuff on the ntfs?

Oh, and sorry for the "misinformation". Living and learning

 

I read and write to my NTFS partition in Ubuntu, because my photo directory is still over and Picasa beta 2.7 scans it. I don't believe however linux programs can be installed on NTFS. I'm just catching up on all this myself.