Linux and Partitions and Junk

tba

Hello long time short time lurker first time poster here. Im a long time windows user sick of their general attitude, and Id like to get used to linux, and by that I mean really profficient.

There is a couple of things I would like to know. I have been looking at the linux file structure and realise that it will come to me eventually but when reading the installation instructions for the distro I got (gentoo) iot says I will be making several partitions on my drive before install.

Can anyone tell me if what these partitions are, what they do and any general info that might not be obvious straight away ( such as cross OS file access, partion size, etc..).

Plus if I wnat to can I merge or alter these partitions at a later date.

Even a link in the right direction would be a help.

tomk

Firstly, general info here.

I'm not a Gentoo user myself, but if you're a first time Linux user, I'd recommend you go with whetever your chosen distro's default configuration is - you can always change it later, when you know more.

It is not necessary to have more than one partition to run Linux - I run Debian and Arch Linux in a single partition each. Partition size will obviously depend on your hardware to a degree, and if you want to share files between Linux and Windoze, a separate FAT32 partition would be handy. Linux has a NTFS driver, and ther are some Win EXT2 drivers, but FAT32 is the only reliable way of reading and writing in both distros, IMO.

angelofdeath

if you haven't used linux before, its really not a good idea jumping straight into gentoo, pick a more beginner friendly distro to start off with, then when your more proficient you can attemp to install gentoo. i'd recommend installing ubuntu (dead easy) and just mess about with it for a while

tba

Thank you for the link tomk.

Ill have a look at that distro angelofdeath, thanks.

So I have two physically seperate hard drives, one @20gig master boot and the other @ 80gig slaved to it both with an NTFS file system. The 80 gig holds most of my documents.

From what I have gathered a format of the primary boot (fat 32) followed by a partition into, say two 10 gig sections, would allow Linux too run on one and windows if nessessary on the other.

Or would I be better of installing the two operating systems on two seperate drives?

voxpop

NTFS doesnt mix too well with linux or any other os other than windows. As far as i know you can just about read from ntfs with linux but writing to a ntfs partition is a bad idea.

as for partitioning you hd - i would go for
/boot - 100mb
/swap - ~512mb
/ - the rest

the above is a v simple partitioning example but will work fine.
Let linux control your mbr and set grub as your boot loader.
Use reiserfs for your linux filesystem or maybe xfs (only been using this for a few months so far -in a pvr- but seems solid)

as for the distro - gentoo can be a bit tricky but if your technical and dont mind doing some reading you should be ok. For an easy setup try RH Fedora core 3 - its a breeze to setup and get going (note if you using fedora use ext3 for your boot partition).

For some nice logical partitioning check out LVM - it allows you to span a logical partition across a number of physical disks and add extra disks in the future.

angelofdeath

personally, id partition the 20gig with a 10gig ntfs and a 10gig ext3, and format the 80gig to fat32, if you have any programs that require that little bit of extra speed stick them on the ntfs or ext3, use the fat32 for stuff like movies and music that won't really notice the difference performance-wise

edit:// as said above also a /boot and /swap on the 20gig, and also yeah go reiserfs as well instead of ext3

Syth

tba wrote:

Can anyone tell me if what these partitions are, what they do and any general info that might not be obvious straight away ( such as cross OS file access, partion size, etc..).

Plus if I wnat to can I merge or alter these partitions at a later date.

You need at least 3 partitions. One for /boot. This holds the kernel images. 50 MB is a good size for this. Then swap. The recommendation is about 1.5 to 2 times your RAM, though I have 512MB of RAM and I've rarely used my swap partition (all 700 MBs of it), so it's up to you.You'll then need a / or root partition. This is where your OS goes.

There is software out there to repartition hardrives (eg parted, qtparted), but they are limited. For example one can only resize a partiton by changing the end of the partition, not the start. So the end of it can go everywhich way, but the start is static. You cannot 'merge' 2 partitions directly, the only way is to copy the contents of a partiton to somewhere else, wipe that partition, grow the other one over it and copy it back. Not really merging at all!

I was going to recommend not used Gentoo as your first intro to linux, but you say you want to reall learn linux, and gentoo is good for learning linux, but it's a like throwing yourself in the deepend. You might be better going for something like Slackware for a little while until you get the hang of it.

tomk

tomk wrote:

It is not necessary to have more than one partition to run Linux

Apologies, tba - I forgot about swap - DOH! So you need a minimum of two partitions, although as Syth recommends, you could also have a separate boot partition. For me, a boot directory does fine.

tba

thanks everyone, some very straight answers there, just what I needed.

Giblet

I have a boot partition, a root partition, a swap partition, and a home partition. Handy for reformatting if you mess something up, so you don't lose all the stuff you have downloaded.

Syth

Giblet wrote:

I have a boot partition, a root partition, a swap partition, and a home partition. Handy for reformatting if you mess something up, so you don't lose all the stuff you have downloaded.

Me too. /boot, /, swap, /home. I put /home on hda3. hda1 has to be /boot, hda2 is swap because it's faster to access the start of the disk than the end. I put /home before / because all the open source partitioning programmes I've seen can only change the end of the partition, not the start. This way I can grow /home as much as I want. Having it at the end would have ment my /home partition would have been unresizeable.

Gavin

I have /
no swap.

I store all my files in CVS on a remote machine. Laziness !

Gav