Posted on 01/17/2019 8:28:14 AM PST by ShadowAce
There are 4 ways of "installing" Linux:
Generally installers have excellent partitioning tools so this is all part of the install. If not, or if you are not installing it is easiest to use a live CD distro that has GParted on it, such as ubuntu. GParted does not support LVM volumes used on more complicated partitioning setups, however fedoras installer for example and debians can install and partition LVM volumes.
Generally installers have excellent partitioning tools so this is all part of the install. If not, or if you are not installing it is easiest to use a live CD distro that has GParted on it, such as ubuntu. GParted does not support LVM volumes used on more complicated partitioning setups, however fedoras installer for example and debians can install and partition LVM volumes.
You would be hard-pressed to fit a normal desktop Linux system in under 2GB. It's advisable to give Linux more space than that, however, because many, many applications are available for free for Linux, and especially with a high-speed Internet connection, one is likely to install quite a lot of them.
You should plan on leaving at least 20% of each of your hard drive partitions free at all times -- modern file systems (such as NTFS, ext3 and ReiserFS) try to keep fragmentation low on their own, but they need extra space to do it with.
(NOTE: Most of this only applies if there is already a version of Microsoft Windows on the computer) The volume resizing is a safe process, but afterwards the hard drive must be repartitioned. An error here can destroy the data on the hard drive, so double-check all commands. A typical session with ntfsresize ("/dev/hda1" is the most likely name for the NTFS partition. In this case, it is 10 GB in size.):
paul@faust:/$ su Password:
You must be root to run ntfsresize. Under Knoppix {what about other live CDs? Under Gentoo's LiveCD, you are already root, so the su will not prompt for a password. Anyone know about others? I'd assume no-password or already-root would cover most of them...}, you will not be asked for a password unless you had already set one.
faust:/# umount /dev/hda1
This step is only needed if hda1 is already mounted, which is unlikely. However, if it is not needed, it will only give an error message and not do anything.
faust:/# ntfsresize -i /dev/hda1 ntfsresize v1.9.0 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Cluster size : 4096 bytes Current volume size: 10999992832 bytes (11000 MB) Current device size: 11013617664 bytes (11014 MB) Checking filesystem consistency ... 100.00 percent completed Accounting clusters ... Space in use : 4197 MB (38.2%) Estimating smallest shrunken size supported ... File feature Last used at By inode $MFT : 8223 MB 0 Multi-Record : 3160 MB 14852 You might resize at 4196970496 bytes or 4197 MB (freeing 6803 MB). Please make a test run using both the -n and -s options before real resizing!
ntfsresize, version 1.90 and later, will automatically move files (including ones that the Windows defragmenter can't) in order to resize the partition, so defragmentation is not necessary before resizing (it might be easier to defragment while the partition is larger, though, so its a good opportunity).
The next step does a test run of the resizing process. Here, the user decided to leave Windows with about 6GB of space.
faust:/# ntfsresize -n -s 6000M /dev/hda1 ntfsresize v1.9.0 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Cluster size : 4096 bytes Current volume size: 10999992832 bytes (11000 MB) Current device size: 11013617664 bytes (11014 MB) New volume size : 5999993344 bytes (6000 MB) Checking filesystem consistency ... 100.00 percent completed Accounting clusters ... Space in use : 4197 MB (38.2%) Needed relocations : 251614 (1031 MB) Schedule chkdsk for NTFS consistency check at Windows boot time ... Resetting $LogFile ... (this might take a while) Relocating needed data ... 100.00 percent completed Updating $BadClust file ... Updating $Bitmap file ... Updating Boot record ... The read-only test run ended successfully.
Now, write down the exact number of megabytes passed on the command line here (in this case, 6000). (The file system will probably not be resized to the exact size you specify, but ignore that — use what you entered.) You will need to resize the partition to the same size later.
Run ntfsresize with the same parameters, except leaving out the -n. This resizes the ntfs filesystem, but not the partition.
Splitting the partition is the only remaining task. Be sure to give it the hard drive (like "/dev/hda") as a parameter, rather than the partition ("/dev/hda1").
faust:/# cfdisk /dev/hda
If you don't have cfdisk, use fdisk instead. It has a less friendly interface, but it has exactly the same commands. Either way, no changes are made to the disk until you tell the program to (w)rite out the new partition table. If you accidentally write out the wrong partition structure, you should be able to save your data by replacing it with the correct one before doing anything to the affected partitions.
You need to
/: /boot: /home/ and /home on one partition, if you're into that sort of thing, you know.Note: If you're an advanced user and want to have few Linux systems installed side-by-side, or different file systems for experimenting, configuring Logical Volume Manager may be a good idea.
More:
Which one? This has a lot to do with it.
What version is that? Got a link?
Yep... Hold on.
Linux takes about 15 minutes to install while Windows 10 will take you the whole day and night
This is, of course, dependent on the size of your hard disk that you will be using. The above will ensure plenty of space for applications, data, and will ensure a usable system if you happen to fill up one of the /var, /opt/, or /usr filesystems.
Sent you a PM with the information.
I follow the same practice, I never jump right into the new distros.
I am posting this from a laptop with a bad SATA controller.
It is booted from an external USB3 drive and runs faster than when it was Windoze, so yeah. No internal HDD needed, but just a bad hard drive? So easy to swap if it is just that. Still run Linux and for when it is a Windows only program run it in a virtual machine Windows session.
The 18.3 was the stable version for quite awhile and was known to work on just about everything. It was the newest release when I got mint. Just after they came out with 19. But I decided to wait and let them get the bugs out of it. Right away they put out 19.1. Yep... obviously there were some problems or they would not have come up with a newer version to replace 19 so fast. So the dust is still settling on both 19 and 19.1 for awhile.
Right on! Thank you for sharing that very important knowledge! I was not sure if it would or not. Fantastic!
Pretty good recommendations. 80-200GB for everything but /home is plenty. I actually would recommend that folks use a second drive for /home if they can do it. Makes future upgrades very painless. It will allow you to pretty much keep all personal stuff completely separate from system files. On my current desktop, which is getting kinda old, my system drive is on a modestly sized SSD, while /home is 2 much larger drives using LVM.
Thanks for your help.
Absolutely my privilege, just holler anytime.
It is easier to recover from running out of disk space if everything is on fewer(one) partitions.
I suggest “new” users with modern PCs just use a single partition for everything with one common exception for a possible swap partition.
If you use RAID then a non-RAID /boot partition may also be helpful. A /boot partition ideally will be big enough to hold more than one kernel. A ‘HUGE’ monolithic kernel can be about 300MB so a .5GB /boot partition would create a limitation of one kernel only.
If you have 8G or more of RAM memory, and you run out of RAM, you will be waiting nearly forever for your computer to unfreeze while it copies up to 8G of RAM to the hard disk swap partition. Then you get to wait another almost forever for everything that is normally there to be copied back.
A computer that is actually RAM limited and forced into using slow disk based RAM(swap) will appear to be frozen.
If you are lucky the disk light will blink off occasionally to let you know it’s still ‘thinking’.
Any swap of more than 4G if it ever gets used will likely make you wish it just crashed so you could get on with life.
Same thing goes for microshaft virtual memory/paging file(disk based RAM).
If you have old hardware or RAM limited new hardware(Pi etc.) then swap not only makes sense but may be necessary to function. Adjust expectations accordingly.
YMMV
:)
Later.
Based on my rather extensive experience, you are incorrect. If you run out of space on /, your system won't boot and you have to resort to other methods. With my partitioning scheme, running out of space on / is highly unlikely, and you can fix whichever filesystem is full.
If one want to install Linux and heed the above, then as regards dual-booting, have read from Linux sites that for any resizing of Windows partitions then one should use Windows Disk management (right click on the This PC/My Computer in explorer and choose Manage). Or use Gparted in the Linux live distro such as Mint as it is there.
Also, the easiest and safest way to dual boot if you have a desktop and a spare drive (and a 120GB SSD cost about 20.00 now), and install it (and partition if you want). Then find out which key (like F9, F11) to be tapping (not taping) just after you turn your PC on that will provide options of what source to boot from.
Then for most PCs, create a USB Linux live disk (Rufus works well), and shut down and unplug just PC and your Windows drive (do not confuse the two). Then plug in you PC, boot, tapping the F11 key or whatever you manufacturer makes it, in order to bring up a list of drives to boot from, and choose the USB drive. Then after booting the Linux live disto you can just install it using the defaults it offers.
After doing so, shut down and plug your Windows drive back in, and use the the above method to choose which drive and its system to boot from.
I just installed Linux Minti 19.1 on a HP G7 (2012) and it runs well, if no faster than W/7, and the much faster Solid State Drives are quite inexpensive. See my above post for more on this.
What is the difference between the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions?
Cinnamon VS Mate VS KDE VS XFCE. A list of comments I found around.
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