Thank you for the clear guide. Really appreciate the part on retaining Home partition if we want to retain existing data while installing a new version of the Linux distribution we are using. It may be so obvious to the experts - but for us the non-Linux-expert masses, we knew nothing about that and yet it is such a critical point.
Perfectly explained installation process .... I'm a big Joe Collins fan since discovering his channel 2 months ago, and whilst transferring over to Linux. Keep up the good work brother, your efforts are very much appreciated here in Wales/UK!!
Excellent video! As another (Linux Lite) noob, I was also able to follow along in real time. Thanks for taking the time to help us come over from the dark (Windoz) side.
Hello Joe. I've been watching your videos for a while now. Very informative stuff. Something I always click on. Here's a bit of a grey zone you'll certainly be able to cast some light on: I have an SSD drive (256GB) in my laptop which came with Ubuntu pre-installed. As this machine has 8GB of RAM, Dell decided to create a 16GB swap partition and have the rest of the disk being filled up by Ubuntu itself. So far so good. I wanted to install a second linux distribution alongside Ubuntu. So, what I did was: 1. Shrinking existing Ubuntu partition 2. Creating a new swap partition of 16GB and setting it right against the other swap towards the end of the disk (I know partition positions are less of a concern with SSDs but I did so to keep things clean) 3. Created a new ext4 partition for my new distribution 4. During the installation, I mentioned that I wanted this new distribution to use this new and ONLY this new swap space Things are going quite well so far but I wonder if what I did was the most optimal solution. 1. Does one need one swap partition per distribution? I know hibernate/sleep/suspend will use this space but when you switch between OSs, you reboot so... I don't know. What do you say? 2. Also, I can see you use 1xRAM+100MB as your swap partition size. I know swap size is a bit of a grey zone nowadays as some say you still need double the size of your RAM, some say just over 1x and some say you don't need it at all (from what I understood, this last option was mainly applicable to high availability systems such as servers where you really don't want the system to swap things in and out). What's your take on this? Why? Thank you in advance for clarifications. Bravo for the channel once again...
You only need one swap partition no matter how many Linux disttros you have. Each one can use it while running. Swap is temporary storage. Second, 16 GB is ridiculously large. The old "Twice the size of installed RAM" rule is from the days when physical RAM was expensive and the system required the extra virtual memory on disk to run. It makes sense if you have 512 MB or 1 GB of ram and that's it. Running any OS without some virtual memory available is a bad idea. Some programs use the swap space independently of the OS and the Linux kernel will sometimes swap stuff in to virtual memory under heavy CPU activity even if the system has available RAM. Running with no virtual memory at all can cause programs to be unstable. It's best to give the kernel some swap to work with no matter how much memory is in the system and since drive space is cheap these days there's no reason not to.
Joe Collins, that clarifies it once and for all. I was surprised to see there was little to no clear information on this particular situation online. The only related post I found was claiming one needed one swap/distro. And (even though I had doubts) so I did. I think it might be another interesting topic for you to cover in one of your upcoming videos.
Thanks Joe it really helped me a lot in partitioning my hdd. I just tried installing Zorin OS 15 on my laptop, since i’m a beginner. I’m planning to install linux mint in the future and gotta watch all of your videos.Thanks again keep safe.
If you are ever going to use the hibernation feature, your swap partitiion needs to be at least the size of your RAM plus a little bit extra for the overhead. Hibernation will try to save your memory on your swap partition and will not work if there's not enough space.
Joe: This is a slight change from your recommendations in past videos. In those, you recommended 3 partitions, /, swap, and /home. Here, you've split the / partition into boot and /. Is this solely to speed up the boot process or is there another reason? Also, in Jay LaCroix's "Linux Mint Essentials", he recommends 30 GB for the / partition where you recommend 15 GB. Any reason other than anticipation of how much software one is going to install? I'm assuming that if one is a big gamer, one would want a rather large / space. (?)
+walter wolfe Jay gives really good advice in his book. I'm just going a little further with it. Putting the /boot right up front does make the boot process go a bit faster and it keeps the kernel, grub and other boot files together instead of spreading them throughout a larger file system. This is a tweak and not necessary... The system will happily run in one big / partition but I have seen improvements so I now do it this way. The size of the / partition comes from my experience. It rarely grows larger than 10 GB's so 15 GB's is enough for a system that you don't plan on adding a bunch of software to or only plan to run for a short time. In practice, 25 is plenty and 30 is way more than most folks will need. :)
Hey Joe, is this process valid or applicable if you need to retain Windows on one of the partitions? Also can you explain on why you decided to go with Primary as opposed to Logical partition? Thanks
The partition scheme you have onscreen at minute 13:30 is the same I had always used since 2007 and it always works fine with any linux distro, I have seen a lot of people having problems with for example LVM partitions, so I always recommend this type of partition scheme you're using here for the average linux user. Oh! another thing, for the average linux user that doesn't do for example video editing or that sort of stuff, 4GB of Swap should be enough, anything over this amount of Swap space would be a waste of disk space.
If you want to create empty ext4 or ntfs or fat32 partitions in linux, just don't assign any mount point when creating these extra partitions. You will get message saying this partition wont be used at all or something like that, just continue. You can use these empty partitions for storage or something like you do on windows.
If you want to install multiple Linux distributions on your PC, but want separate configuration files: I recommend you to create a Partition mounted to a folder, which is normally not a system folder, for example: "/storage" and instead of having your files in: "/home/USER/Documents, etc." you create folders, containing the files you want to share across your distros and create symlinks to them, for example: Replace "/home/USER/Documents" with a symlink pointing to "/storage/USER/Documents" Only problem I found: Deleting things doesn't work (Moving them to the "Trash" folder, direct deleting still works)
For any reasonably recent kernel (going all the way back to 2.6 or something), I would actually recommend using a swap file rather than a swap partition. There is no performance difference, and a swap file offers much more versatility for all your other partitions.
great vlog and explanation of drive partitioning for linux.. started to experiment with installing Ubuntu 19.10 + LM 19 on the same drive... do i have to create a seperate home + root for each linux install? i did that just too see if this works which of course it did but wanted to know if that is the correct way when creating multi[ple installs on the same drive... :-)
Having a separate /home is not absolutely necessary... It's fine to just have / for each OS. You won't need to create more than one swap partition, though. :)
I honestly don't know what all the fuss is about swap partitions. I've got an HP XW8200 that's at least 15 years old, and has capacity for 16Gb (which I filled immediately). With Debian 12 and a full KDE Plasma GUI, and serving SSH, NFS (w/ autofs), and Samba service for all the machines on the local subnet, it typically uses less than 10% of available RAM. Even when re-building the kernel or GCC (w/ j==4), our log file (output of time command) showed that there were only a handful of page faults throughout the entire build. So you really don't need a swap file anymore: big motherboards nowadays often allow 64Gb RAM (!); but my point is that even older machines w/ 4 or 8Gb really don't need it. MAYBE an older 32-bit machine that's going to be VERY busy might need one, but you could get by without one.
There are time when the kernel and some third party software will access swap space directly even if the machine has plenty of free memory. Omitting swap all together is not advised by developers and therefore you should allocate a small swapfile or swap partition for each install. :)
Good video. But there's a loose end flapping for me, anyway. For the non-specified mount points (/tmp, /usr, /var, ..), what partition are they written to? I'm guessing the partition with the root (/) mount point. Is that right?
Interesting. I tried this partitioning method to have /home separate instead of letting the system make one partition with everything in from another video also by Joe Collins. MY TEST WAS DONE IN A VirtualBox MACHINE WITH 64bit OS. DO NOT TRY THIS IN A LIVE WORKSTATION, I'M NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DATA LOSS OR ANY DAMAGES, ETC. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP YOUR DATA! 3 IS 2 IS 1 & 1 IS NONE! -I installed Xubuntu 16.04.1. At the screen where you enter your name and machine name, password etc, I entered "user1" as the user name. After Xubuntu was installed, I created a 'Test' file in /home/user1/Documents folder to see if the file could survive my first attempt at upgrading to a different os and keeping my files in /home. -Next I Installed Linux Mint 18.1 and did all the steps the same, except for the user info (name, password etc) I used a different name "user2" I was expecting that the 'Test' file would remain intact in /home/user1/Documents; it wasn't, there was no file in the /home/Documents folder for user2. I went and checked the File System>Home and found the user1 folder(normal folder icon)from the Xubuntu install(the 'Test' file was there) and the user2 folder(with a house icon indicating the home folder for user2 in Linux Mint). -Last step while in Linux Mint 18.1 as user2, I made another 'Test1' file in /home/user2/Documents. -I installed Ubuntu 16.04.1, except this time for the user information, I entered the same user information I used with Linux Mint, and behold, the file 'Test1' was where I had left it /home/user2/Documents, except this time it was set on the default /home/Documents folder for the Ubuntu install. So, I guess if you are keeping a separate /home partition, use the same user information from the previous installation to upgrade/reload your linux os. I watched the "How to Upgrade or Reload Linux while Keeping Your Data." also from Joe Collins, but I didn't hear him comment on keeping the user information the same to keep the files structure intact in /home. He did however enter the same user information, I guess I could have picked up on that before doing all this testing, oh well, I learned a lot more by testing it myself than assuming I understood all Joe Collins was demonstrating. I wonder if this would work if I were to install some other distro that wasn't in the Ubuntu flavors(Xubuntu, Ubuntu, Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu)).
Great video. Very detailed. I have some questions. On the creation of the Boot Partition if I'm trying to Dual Boot with Mac OSX, should I use Ext 4 instead o Ext2 File System? I have been having trouble installing Ubuntu on my Mac. Again, I want to keep my Mac partitions in tact and just install Ubuntu as well. I get no option when installing Ubuntu to "Install Ubuntu Alongside Mac OS X", so I have to go the "Something Else" route and create partitions. Thanks for your time & any advice you can give me. I'm completely new to Linux.
Well I used your Directions & followed it to a "T". Did not work. This is my 5th attempt installing Ubuntu as a Dual Boot on my Mac. I get a Grub error at startup. No matter who's directions I follow, It never does work. I installed it on a PC Alongside Windows 7 and it works perfectly on a PC. Before seeing your video, I never created a Boot partition but that still did not work. I have an 2009 iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 3.09 w/ 8GB's RAM, 64 Bit.I'm running El Capitan. Thanks.
This is not for Macs... This applies to PC's Installing on a Mac is a different process. I suggest you look up an installation guide for Macs. help.ubuntu.com/community/How%20to%20install%20Ubuntu%20on%20MacBook%20using%20USB%20Stick
I know how to make the flash drive. Like I said, I have done this numerous times, each time with different results. I was able to put it on my Macbook Pro with reFind. And I'm typing from it now. I also successfully put it on my iMac once and it worked fine. But then I decided I wanted to allocate more drive space to Ubuntu, so I started over & that's where I am now. I'm going to try putting reFind on the iMac and just 2 partitions. One for SWAP and one for Linux.
I have 2 500gb HDDs on my laptop. I was using 1hdd for Kubuntu and the other for Windows10 I gave up windows so I decided to erase everything and mounted it to Kubuntu as my storage HDD. The 2nd HDD is only for backup personal data like files and music. When I installed Kubuntu I followed the basic installation. Can I still partition like you are doing it in here or should I reinstall Kubuntu and follow your advanced partition style?
How do add an UEFI parition? I am runniing only Mint with a UEFI Bios. Received error during boot. Do I need to create apartion inside boot or separately?
Joe Collins Can I confirm that the MBR partition type is used only to place Linux kernel and the Logicals partitions are used to storage others programs ?
@@eugeniolopes8134 No, Linux doesn't work that way. To be honest, if you're installing to a UEFI enabled machine it's best to just let it do the partitioning. :)
It is not a dumb question. You can compute the exact space, but you still need to round it up somewhat for a possible hibernation. If Hibernate feature is not used, the exact swap size does not matter.
I Have 1 question. Isn't better to create swap partition before root ? I read that if swap is creating first - before root and home partitions - computer works faster. I tried and it actually works better (dual core 2gb of ram (old one)).
Hello sir and thx for all the good work! Have a question though, just installed Cinnamon 19.3 two weeks ago with this advanced partitionning method, everything works well but today i did some sys supdates and i received a warning indicating that my boot partition is 97.4% full, i rebooted,, same warning. I will be investigating this pb today but if you have some tips it would be greatly appreciated !! Thx again.
I use linux mint 17 with 2000 MB of swap on dual boot machine with 4GB of RAM. I am able to suspend it (hybernate). So I am not sure if "the same swap as RAM" rule is applicable anymore.
I just upgraded my laptop drive to a 1TB drive. I tried cloning it, but it looks like I'm going to have to do a clean install of Win10 and rebuild my triple-boot (Kali and Manjaro). I'm taking some previous advice that you gave me to heart and creating a /home partition for both distros. Would I use this approach for both installs, or is that even possible?
+Larry Wilson I have never tried that myself but I know it's possible. The only problem that I can see you running into is if the two distros that share the home partition are running different desktop environment with conflicting settings. For instance, mate Unity and Cinnamon all use some of the same config files and you may get some strangeness. If bot distros use the same desktop, the setting you put in for one will work in the other. :)
Hi Joe. Very helpful, but what if you want two distros on one SSD with a shared swap partition and a shared /home partition: together 4 primary partitions ? The installation wizard won't accept this.
Hi Joe. Did exactly as you had stated.Big drive 3 tb . Loaded Mint 17.2 on the whole drive.Then on another hard drive i downloaded Mate 16.04. I backed up my Mate to my my 3Tb drive. Now can't use my linux mint.Mate shows up on 3TB .Wants to install itself.Can't boot into my Mint.Grub 2 does not recognize my Mint. Made every rescue cd plus tried my Mint live cd. Nothing works.Is there a command line that I can use to get my Mint back
+marc ravey Not sure what's going on here but you could try 'sudo update-grub' to make one find the other. You can also use the boot menu for your computer to boot the other drive. :)
Joe: A footnote to your video wrt UEFI. I tried your partitioning scheme, only to find that one of my machines has UEFI. I did disable secure boot and tried to disable UEFI and enable legacy boot, but the installer still barfed at the partition point with some message about the disk itself requiring something else at the beginning of the partition table. Don''t remember the exact message. I would have to redo it to get it back. (And it's highly probable that I didn't do it correctly.) Did some research on what exactly UEFi is. The sort story (and there is a much longer one) is that I re-enabled UEFI (and disabled legacy). At least in Ubuntu 14.04, one on the options in the menu for the first partition type is "UEFI boot" (or maybe EFI boot?). When I selected that for the first partition, everything worked (and still works) fine. Thanks for the video(s). Very helpful.
+walter wolfe You can open Gparted and use that tool to comoletely clear the disk then you don't have to use UEFI at all. However, you got it installed so you're good to go. Just keep it in mind for next time. :)
You don't have to separate /boot on either an SSD or SSHD because it doesn't matter where stuff is on an SSD and an SSHD will cache the entire /boot folder after you restart the machine three times.
Hi :) I cannot find '/' and 'home' flags in my partitioning tool (Gparted). I have only boot, diag, esp, hidden, irst, lba, lvm, palo, prep, raid. What should I choose to make my partitioning similar to yours?
Use the partitioning toll in the installer... Gparted can't add mount points like that. It just creates partitions. The mount points are created at install. :)
Thanks for the great video! AS a newbie this was so helpful. I have a question tho... Bearing in mind I have a spare laptop and this is all in the interests of experimentation and learning... When setting up partitions during install on a 500GB spinning drive I have : /boot 512mb ext2 primary / 25GB ext4 journalling primary /swap 10GB primary If I try to set /home as 100GB and leave the rest of the drive unallocated, the unallocated part becomes 'unusable' If I allow the /home partition the remainder of the drive I can use it all. Why is this??
The MSDOS Master Boot Record (MBR) will only allow you to allocate 4 primary partition. Make the /home partition a logical partition and then you can add more partitions within the logical partition. More info here: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1617750
Ah I thought it may be to do with the partition type! I'll have a look at that link--thank you. Is it possible to change a partition from Primary to Logical after it has been created or will I have to delete the partition and then create a new one?
Hello Joe I find your videos very informative and you are a very very clever Guy I would like to ask and I know you don't like d u a l booters but I am fighting with a method in which to do a disc image using clonezilla but with the variation of restoring this disc image to a larger drive my question is I'm using Linux Mint 18.1 xfce if I were trying to install a larger HDD what would I need to do? I like the idea up having a swab drive because I use and would appreciate any commentary with regard to a particular backup program call R e d of which I use consistently and works very well and the same drive for which I backup my ext4 petition which is linux and I've used it for a long time so if I want to increase a new drive can you direct me to some linked take into account the swap partition and allow for a larger HDD with with gratitude I thank you
If your machine has UEFI instead of regular bios... In that case, I find it's best to just let the installer automatically partition the dixk and edit it later. Either way, It's more complicated.
Hey Joe help please: I have not been able to update Arch in VirtualBox (not enough room and it has 20 GB)(Win10 btw) and this is in three different PCs. I think I just discovered the problem. Going over my notes I see I went with sda1 9g; sda2 2g and sda3 9g. Why I even have an sda3 is beyond me. Anyway, can I safely alter those such that sda1 gets the lion's share without having to start all over again? I have a really nice install. I don't even care if I have an sda3. Please give me the recipe and thanks. I need the recipe because I have forgotten so much. I launched GParted and see the following in the gui (but I cannot unmount any of the three partitions (it says it's busy) and I can't change the size using either the slide-bar or by typing in a smaller size for say sda3): Partition File System Mount Point Size Used Unused /dev/sda1 ext4 / 9.00 GiB 8.10 GiB 921.57 MiB /dev/sda2 linux-swap 2.00 GiB 0.00 GiB 2.00 GiB /dev/sda3 ext4 /home 9.00 GiB 611.73 MiB 8.40 GiB What gives? What is going on? I thought maybe the slide-bar wouldn't work because it first has to be unmounted, so I tried that and it cannot be unmounted! Thanks
Your best bet is to re-install. While it's possible to expand partitions, the way you've laid out the drive makes that a bit difficult. You can try but it may not work because you'd have to move starting points and that usually changes the UUID of a partition.
Sad to hear the comment about uefi at the start, gone are the good old days of computing when you could turn off UEFI/TPM/Secureboot and just shrug. Although there were maybe a couple reasons before for GPT + UEFI (windows goes ahead and snags 2 primary partitions, that only leaves one primary for one BSD or Solaris) Windows 11 is going to insist on UEFI + the works, sucks because I've had so much trouble even these days getting bootable usbs to be consistently recognized on UEFI BIOS.
Need help while installing Linux mint, I am getting this error "the partition /dev/sdc2 assigned to / starts at an offset of 512 bytes from the minimum alignment for this disk, which may lead to very poor performance"
This means that the system thinks you have an SSD that is not formatted correctly. Let the installer format the disk or ignore it if you don't want to wipe the disk entirely.
I changed hard drives so I thought I'd give this method a try. I chose Linux Lite 2.8. The computer works but I messed up. Yesterday I was looking at my partitions and noticed that somehow I ended up with /Boot Ext4 instead of 2. And I set my swap to 81 gig. Last night I booted into my gparted live CD and fixed the swap and home partition. Is there a trick to fix the boot partition? lol
+gregorylock I was just now looking at partition scheme through the gparted that is installed with Linux Lite. It is telling me that the /boot is set to ext2. Then I brought up fstab in gedit and it also tells me that the /boot is ext2. There is probably a bug in the gparted version that is on my CD. However the swap number I really did mess up on. No problem it's fixed now. *roles eyes.
I've been using Ubuntu for the past year and a half, it even updated from 15.04 to 15.10 and my root partition has not even reached 10GB. In my current configuration I have a 120GB SSD where the root partition is mounted, and a 500GB HDD where the /var, /home and swap partitions are mounted. I feel like I'm wasting my SSD cause I'm only using like 8% of it. What would be a better configuration for my system? I'm planning to update to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in April when it gets released and I will make a clean install, so I may as well change all my partitions.
+Javier Portillo The way you've got it now you're not getting much of a performance boost from the SSD since you put /var on the HDD along with /home and swap. Basically, you're getting a faster boot time and application loading but not much else. How much data do you have in your home folder? If it's more than 100 GB than you're going to have to put /home on the spinning drive. If it's less, you could put the whole system on the SSD and use the HDD for storage but then you'd have to make that drive automatically mount at startup by adding it manually to the fstab file. Here's what I'd do to get the best performance and still have the HDD mounted as the default /home partition: Mount / on the SSD and go on and let it use all the space. Yeah, you're not going to use but 10 per cent of it but the drive will last longer because it's going to have plenty of room to rotate write cycles. I'd put swap as the first partition of the HDD and then use the rest of the space for /home. You can enhance performance by adjusting swappiness so the system will only actually swap when it's just about out of physical RAM. Setting at 10 or 15 will do the trick nicely. askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness Yes, putting /var on the HDD will reduce write cycles on the SSD but it will also slow things down quite a bit. The way I see it, you'r e only using 10 per cent of SSD to begin with and allowing the system to use it for logs will speed things up quite a bit. One more thing to do is to open the Disks utility, find 'Drive Settings' in the 'More Actions' menu (it looks like a gear or three or four horizontal lines up in the top right corber) and set the write cache to ON for both the SSD and HDD. That should speed things up even more. You can go on and do that now. I bet you'll see quite an improvement. Keep me posted. :)
+Joe Collins SSDs are getting cheaper, so I guess I should stop worrying about the write cycles and put the /var directory on my SSD. In the meantime, I will back up all my stuff before updating. Thanks a lot for your answer! :D
tried this with linux mint 19.2 on a modern i5 computer and it told me i don't have a uefi partition and machine probably won't boot. So went with erase and lvm. hopefully i can setup a swap later.
Applied the settings for my 2 GB ram laptop acer aspire 5738. If I want to install 64 bit linux later should I just change ext4 partition that has / or create new partitions(currently installing 32 bit because of 2 GB Ram ) ?
hey I'm using Windows XP and now i want to change my OS to linux lite and i don't want to lose my Data except drive c's where my XP is installed so what should i do please help me out
Copy all of you personal data to an external hard drive and then put it back in once you've installed Linux. You should be running backups like that on a regular basis anyway. :)
My drive is.2TB with OPEN SUSE 12.2 RAM 4GB - and I then USE 16.500 GB [RAM x 4 Times + abt 100MB). This means I n e v e r run out of RAM and IT WOULDN'T GET OUT OF MEMORY FAULT, BUT MAKE IT A PRIMARY PARTITION. det The /boot - I make, whatever, a 512MB similar as You did and also a Primary partition. Next make REST OF HDD an EXTENDED PARTITION which gives You about 1.82GB. Make 3 x 20 GB logical partitions, with names as: /usr (*) 20GB; /home abt 40GB and /temp 20GB (or /var); the last is /upd (**) 20GB * then you need NOT to reinstall a fully functional "wine" directory with complete this install. ** Optional with download of abt DVD x 2 updates. Install from this directory - if possible. The rest would be about 1.2GB which are quite enough for even a server install. 73's de Gunnar sm6oer
so i wanna wipe mint of my laptop and install arch +openbox the hd is 500GB dev sda1= ext2 boot, size 5GB dev sda= 2 ext4 home partition 490 gb dev sda 3 4gb swap space. I have 4GB of ram does this look ok? (Keeping this video in context). Thank you :)
This was the video that gave me the confidence to partition a drive for the first time. Thank you.
Thank you for the clear guide. Really appreciate the part on retaining Home partition if we want to retain existing data while installing a new version of the Linux distribution we are using. It may be so obvious to the experts - but for us the non-Linux-expert masses, we knew nothing about that and yet it is such a critical point.
Perfectly explained installation process .... I'm a big Joe Collins fan since discovering his channel 2 months ago, and whilst transferring over to Linux. Keep up the good work brother, your efforts are very much appreciated here in Wales/UK!!
Yeah what I was searching
Excellent video! As another (Linux Lite) noob, I was also able to follow along in real time. Thanks for taking the time to help us come over from the dark (Windoz) side.
Just switched from Windows to GNU/Linux. This video was very informative and helped me in the process, thanks a lot!
Great tutorial for one hard drive. It covers the basics and now I need to find a good one for multiple hard drives.
Thanks so much for making this video. I read numerous forums that led me nowhere, one video and I'm a happy camper.
Hello Joe. I've been watching your videos for a while now. Very informative stuff. Something I always click on.
Here's a bit of a grey zone you'll certainly be able to cast some light on:
I have an SSD drive (256GB) in my laptop which came with Ubuntu pre-installed. As this machine has 8GB of RAM, Dell decided to create a 16GB swap partition and have the rest of the disk being filled up by Ubuntu itself. So far so good.
I wanted to install a second linux distribution alongside Ubuntu. So, what I did was:
1. Shrinking existing Ubuntu partition
2. Creating a new swap partition of 16GB and setting it right against the other swap towards the end of the disk (I know partition positions are less of a concern with SSDs but I did so to keep things clean)
3. Created a new ext4 partition for my new distribution
4. During the installation, I mentioned that I wanted this new distribution to use this new and ONLY this new swap space
Things are going quite well so far but I wonder if what I did was the most optimal solution.
1. Does one need one swap partition per distribution? I know hibernate/sleep/suspend will use this space but when you switch between OSs, you reboot so... I don't know. What do you say?
2. Also, I can see you use 1xRAM+100MB as your swap partition size. I know swap size is a bit of a grey zone nowadays as some say you still need double the size of your RAM, some say just over 1x and some say you don't need it at all (from what I understood, this last option was mainly applicable to high availability systems such as servers where you really don't want the system to swap things in and out). What's your take on this? Why?
Thank you in advance for clarifications.
Bravo for the channel once again...
You only need one swap partition no matter how many Linux disttros you have. Each one can use it while running. Swap is temporary storage. Second, 16 GB is ridiculously large. The old "Twice the size of installed RAM" rule is from the days when physical RAM was expensive and the system required the extra virtual memory on disk to run. It makes sense if you have 512 MB or 1 GB of ram and that's it. Running any OS without some virtual memory available is a bad idea. Some programs use the swap space independently of the OS and the Linux kernel will sometimes swap stuff in to virtual memory under heavy CPU activity even if the system has available RAM. Running with no virtual memory at all can cause programs to be unstable. It's best to give the kernel some swap to work with no matter how much memory is in the system and since drive space is cheap these days there's no reason not to.
Joe Collins, that clarifies it once and for all. I was surprised to see there was little to no clear information on this particular situation online. The only related post I found was claiming one needed one swap/distro. And (even though I had doubts) so I did. I think it might be another interesting topic for you to cover in one of your upcoming videos.
That is what I needed to refresh my memory on how to parition disk for Linux. Ubuntu Mate is installing right now. Big thanks for this video :)
Thanks Joe it really helped me a lot in partitioning my hdd. I just tried installing Zorin OS 15 on my laptop, since i’m a beginner. I’m planning to install linux mint in the future and gotta watch all of your videos.Thanks again keep safe.
Yo, I just started this Linux, and this helped me out a lot. Danke und guten Tag.
Thanks Joe, this really helped. I was able to follow along with the video in real time. 👍
Thanks man this really worked. Before I had the grub install error but if you copy exactly what he did. Should work.
best video i've been searching for
thanks alot
If you are ever going to use the hibernation feature, your swap partitiion needs to be at least the size of your RAM plus a little bit extra for the overhead. Hibernation will try to save your memory on your swap partition and will not work if there's not enough space.
the thing was few do a hibernation than shutting down the computer completely.
I learned this the hard way lol
Joe: This is a slight change from your recommendations in past videos. In those, you recommended 3 partitions, /, swap, and /home. Here, you've split the / partition into boot and /. Is this solely to speed up the boot process or is there another reason? Also, in Jay LaCroix's "Linux Mint Essentials", he recommends 30 GB for the / partition where you recommend 15 GB. Any reason other than anticipation of how much software one is going to install? I'm assuming that if one is a big gamer, one would want a rather large / space. (?)
+walter wolfe Jay gives really good advice in his book. I'm just going a little further with it. Putting the /boot right up front does make the boot process go a bit faster and it keeps the kernel, grub and other boot files together instead of spreading them throughout a larger file system. This is a tweak and not necessary... The system will happily run in one big / partition but I have seen improvements so I now do it this way. The size of the / partition comes from my experience. It rarely grows larger than 10 GB's so 15 GB's is enough for a system that you don't plan on adding a bunch of software to or only plan to run for a short time. In practice, 25 is plenty and 30 is way more than most folks will need. :)
This is the video that helped me the most on this subject so thank you very much sir.
Good systematic approach. Down to earth and personable with solid explanations and reasoning. Thank you.
Thank you. I've pulled the plug on Windows aka Apple part 2 - for good. This is helping me a great deal.
Hey Joe, is this process valid or applicable if you need to retain Windows on one of the partitions? Also can you explain on why you decided to go with Primary as opposed to Logical partition? Thanks
The partition scheme you have onscreen at minute 13:30 is the same I had always used since 2007 and it always works fine with any linux distro, I have seen a lot of people having problems with for example LVM partitions, so I always recommend this type of partition scheme you're using here for the average linux user.
Oh! another thing, for the average linux user that doesn't do for example video editing or that sort of stuff, 4GB of Swap should be enough, anything over this amount of Swap space would be a waste of disk space.
I really like your videos! Keep up the good work. You should do a video on FDE.
If you want to create empty ext4 or ntfs or fat32 partitions in linux, just don't assign any mount point when creating these extra partitions. You will get message saying this partition wont be used at all or something like that, just continue. You can use these empty partitions for storage or something like you do on windows.
If you want to install multiple Linux distributions on your PC, but want separate configuration files:
I recommend you to create a Partition mounted to a folder, which is normally not a system folder, for example: "/storage"
and instead of having your files in: "/home/USER/Documents, etc." you create folders, containing the files you want to share across your distros
and create symlinks to them, for example: Replace "/home/USER/Documents" with a symlink pointing to "/storage/USER/Documents"
Only problem I found: Deleting things doesn't work (Moving them to the "Trash" folder, direct deleting still works)
yaa currentlyusing it as /DATA partition
Fun fact Wine Is Not an Emulatior.
WINE for short :)
It is if you drink enough. 🐱
Thank you Joe, good stuff my friend...
Thank you Joe. Would you partition your drive today the same way as 2016?
Boot 512MB
Root xxGB
Swap e.g. 4100MB
Home xxGB
Thanks Joe, very easy to understand and easy to do too!
Thx Man, I've already tried various method, but this works great for me!
Nice video!
Thanks Joe!
Thanks for this video, very detailed, and a very good stuff, again thanks a lot.
Thanks for the komplit guide 🙏👍
For any reasonably recent kernel (going all the way back to 2.6 or something), I would actually recommend using a swap file rather than a swap partition. There is no performance difference, and a swap file offers much more versatility for all your other partitions.
Can you explain the procedure to create a swap file as opposed to swap partition?
Also please see my main comment about seldom needing even a swap partition (or swap file).
great vlog and explanation of drive partitioning for linux.. started to experiment with installing Ubuntu 19.10 + LM 19 on the same drive... do i have to create a seperate home + root for each linux install? i did that just too see if this works which of course it did but wanted to know if that is the correct way when creating multi[ple installs on the same drive... :-)
Having a separate /home is not absolutely necessary... It's fine to just have / for each OS. You won't need to create more than one swap partition, though. :)
Joe Collins
Ok... understood, will keep on experimenting and trying stuff out... thanks joe.
Nice video. Instead of /home, can I make it logical so that I can use it to store my data? I mean 2 logical partitions or so?
Whatever works for you. :)
Love your videos!
I honestly don't know what all the fuss is about swap partitions. I've got an HP XW8200 that's at least 15 years old, and has capacity for 16Gb (which I filled immediately). With Debian 12 and a full KDE Plasma GUI, and serving SSH, NFS (w/ autofs), and Samba service for all the machines on the local subnet, it typically uses less than 10% of available RAM. Even when re-building the kernel or GCC (w/ j==4), our log file (output of time command) showed that there were only a handful of page faults throughout the entire build. So you really don't need a swap file anymore: big motherboards nowadays often allow 64Gb RAM (!); but my point is that even older machines w/ 4 or 8Gb really don't need it. MAYBE an older 32-bit machine that's going to be VERY busy might need one, but you could get by without one.
There are time when the kernel and some third party software will access swap space directly even if the machine has plenty of free memory. Omitting swap all together is not advised by developers and therefore you should allocate a small swapfile or swap partition for each install. :)
Good video. But there's a loose end flapping for me, anyway. For the non-specified mount points (/tmp, /usr, /var, ..), what partition are they written to? I'm guessing the partition with the root (/) mount point. Is that right?
It all goes into / whether you set it off on a partition or not. :)
So you're essentially short stroking your hard drive by doing this?
Interesting. I tried this partitioning method to have /home separate instead of letting the system make one partition with everything in from another video also by Joe Collins.
MY TEST WAS DONE IN A VirtualBox MACHINE WITH 64bit OS.
DO NOT TRY THIS IN A LIVE WORKSTATION, I'M NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DATA LOSS OR ANY DAMAGES, ETC.
BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP YOUR DATA! 3 IS 2 IS 1 & 1 IS NONE!
-I installed Xubuntu 16.04.1.
At the screen where you enter your name and machine name, password etc, I entered "user1" as the user name.
After Xubuntu was installed, I created a 'Test' file in /home/user1/Documents folder to see if the file could survive my first attempt at upgrading to a different os and keeping my files in /home.
-Next I Installed Linux Mint 18.1 and did all the steps the same, except for the user info (name, password etc) I used a different name "user2" I was expecting that the 'Test' file would remain intact in /home/user1/Documents; it wasn't, there was no file in the /home/Documents folder for user2.
I went and checked the File System>Home and found the user1 folder(normal folder icon)from the Xubuntu install(the 'Test' file was there) and the user2 folder(with a house icon indicating the home folder for user2 in Linux Mint).
-Last step while in Linux Mint 18.1 as user2, I made another 'Test1' file in /home/user2/Documents.
-I installed Ubuntu 16.04.1, except this time for the user information, I entered the same user information I used with Linux Mint, and behold, the file 'Test1' was where I had left it /home/user2/Documents, except this time it was set on the default /home/Documents folder for the Ubuntu install.
So, I guess if you are keeping a separate /home partition, use the same user information from the previous installation to upgrade/reload your linux os. I watched the "How to Upgrade or Reload Linux while Keeping Your Data." also from Joe Collins, but I didn't hear him comment on keeping the user information the same to keep the files structure intact in /home. He did however enter the same user information, I guess I could have picked up on that before doing all this testing, oh well, I learned a lot more by testing it myself than assuming I understood all Joe Collins was demonstrating.
I wonder if this would work if I were to install some other distro that wasn't in the Ubuntu flavors(Xubuntu, Ubuntu, Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu)).
cerberusgear novel much? lol
Great video. Very detailed. I have some questions. On the creation of the Boot Partition if I'm trying to Dual Boot with Mac OSX, should I use Ext 4 instead o Ext2 File System? I have been having trouble installing Ubuntu on my Mac. Again, I want to keep my Mac partitions in tact and just install Ubuntu as well. I get no option when installing Ubuntu to "Install Ubuntu Alongside Mac OS X", so I have to go the "Something Else" route and create partitions. Thanks for your time & any advice you can give me. I'm completely new to Linux.
I would skip the /boot partition entirely in a dual boot. :)
Well I used your Directions & followed it to a "T". Did not work. This is my 5th attempt installing Ubuntu as a Dual Boot on my Mac. I get a Grub error at startup. No matter who's directions I follow, It never does work. I installed it on a PC Alongside Windows 7 and it works perfectly on a PC. Before seeing your video, I never created a Boot partition but that still did not work. I have an 2009 iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 3.09 w/ 8GB's RAM, 64 Bit.I'm running El Capitan. Thanks.
This is not for Macs... This applies to PC's Installing on a Mac is a different process. I suggest you look up an installation guide for Macs. help.ubuntu.com/community/How%20to%20install%20Ubuntu%20on%20MacBook%20using%20USB%20Stick
I know how to make the flash drive. Like I said, I have done this numerous times, each time with different results. I was able to put it on my Macbook Pro with reFind. And I'm typing from it now. I also successfully put it on my iMac once and it worked fine. But then I decided I wanted to allocate more drive space to Ubuntu, so I started over & that's where I am now. I'm going to try putting reFind on the iMac and just 2 partitions. One for SWAP and one for Linux.
Great video, Joe. Thanks.
I have 2 500gb HDDs on my laptop.
I was using 1hdd for Kubuntu and the other for Windows10
I gave up windows so I decided to erase everything and mounted it to Kubuntu as my storage HDD. The 2nd HDD is only for backup personal data like files and music.
When I installed Kubuntu I followed the basic installation. Can I still partition like you are doing it in here or should I reinstall Kubuntu and follow your advanced partition style?
So I would reformat everything but /home? I'm not sure if your instructions are clear for reinstalling and saving /home.
How do add an UEFI parition? I am runniing only Mint with a UEFI Bios. Received error during boot. Do I need to create apartion inside boot or separately?
0:44 that thing is now mandatory for windows 11. so, any update video??
Thanks. You helped me a lot.
Your the Best :-) thanks a lot Joe
Joe Collins, why do you created only primaries partitions and not logicals ? Greetings from Brazil !!!
You can do that if you like.... I just don't like working with logical on MBR because it looks dirty to me. :)
Joe Collins Can I confirm that the MBR partition type is used only to place Linux kernel and the Logicals partitions are used to storage others programs ?
@@eugeniolopes8134 No, Linux doesn't work that way. To be honest, if you're installing to a UEFI enabled machine it's best to just let it do the partitioning. :)
I have a dummy Q, why did you use 15×1000 MB instead of 15×1024 MB . ?
It is not a dumb question. You can compute the exact space, but you still need to round it up somewhat for a possible hibernation. If Hibernate feature is not used, the exact swap size does not matter.
I Have 1 question. Isn't better to create swap partition before root ? I read that if swap is creating first - before root and home partitions - computer works faster. I tried and it actually works better (dual core 2gb of ram (old one)).
Whatever works best for you. :)
Hello sir and thx for all the good work! Have a question though, just installed Cinnamon 19.3 two weeks ago with this advanced partitionning method, everything works well but today i did some sys supdates and i received a warning indicating that my boot partition is 97.4% full, i rebooted,, same warning. I will be investigating this pb today but if you have some tips it would be greatly appreciated !! Thx again.
Use the kernel tool in Update Manager to remove old kernels...
@@EzeeLinux Done thx very much.
I use linux mint 17 with 2000 MB of swap on dual boot machine with 4GB of RAM. I am able to suspend it (hybernate). So I am not sure if "the same swap as RAM" rule is applicable anymore.
Thanks that was helpful.
I just upgraded my laptop drive to a 1TB drive. I tried cloning it, but it looks like I'm going to have to do a clean install of Win10 and rebuild my triple-boot (Kali and Manjaro).
I'm taking some previous advice that you gave me to heart and creating a /home partition for both distros. Would I use this approach for both installs, or is that even possible?
+Larry Wilson I have never tried that myself but I know it's possible. The only problem that I can see you running into is if the two distros that share the home partition are running different desktop environment with conflicting settings. For instance, mate Unity and Cinnamon all use some of the same config files and you may get some strangeness. If bot distros use the same desktop, the setting you put in for one will work in the other. :)
Hi Joe. Very helpful, but what if you want two distros on one SSD with a shared swap partition and a shared /home partition: together 4 primary partitions ? The installation wizard won't accept this.
Manually setup the partitions with Gparted and the choose 'something else' at install and assign whatever you want to where ever you want. :)
@@EzeeLinux I will give it a try! Thanks a lot!
very useful! thank you.
Thank you for the video.
Hi Joe. Did exactly as you had stated.Big drive 3 tb . Loaded Mint 17.2 on the whole drive.Then on another hard drive i downloaded Mate 16.04. I backed up my Mate to my my 3Tb drive. Now can't use my linux mint.Mate shows up on 3TB .Wants to install itself.Can't boot into my Mint.Grub 2 does not recognize my Mint. Made every rescue cd plus tried my Mint live cd. Nothing works.Is there a command line that I can use to get my Mint back
+marc ravey Not sure what's going on here but you could try 'sudo update-grub' to make one find the other. You can also use the boot menu for your computer to boot the other drive. :)
I had lvm dm-1 swap partition, i need to resize but still stuck on it
Can I make the Home partition NTFS?
Because i want Windows to be able to access it.
No... Linux must use a Linux native file system for /home. If not, it will cause lots of permissions issues...
After I pressed Install I got a message saying, "No EFI partition was found. And the Installation may fail. Procede at your own risk."
I don’t understand why it matters where the swap partition is?
great video
Joe: A footnote to your video wrt UEFI. I tried your partitioning scheme, only to find that one of my machines has UEFI. I did disable secure boot and tried to disable UEFI and enable legacy boot, but the installer still barfed at the partition point with some message about the disk itself requiring something else at the beginning of the partition table. Don''t remember the exact message. I would have to redo it to get it back. (And it's highly probable that I didn't do it correctly.) Did some research on what exactly UEFi is. The sort story (and there is a much longer one) is that I re-enabled UEFI (and disabled legacy). At least in Ubuntu 14.04, one on the options in the menu for the first partition type is "UEFI boot" (or maybe EFI boot?). When I selected that for the first partition, everything worked (and still works) fine. Thanks for the video(s). Very helpful.
+walter wolfe You can open Gparted and use that tool to comoletely clear the disk then you don't have to use UEFI at all. However, you got it installed so you're good to go. Just keep it in mind for next time. :)
Don't know if it was a slip of the tongue. Did you mean that both SSD and SSHD will not require a boot partition?
You don't have to separate /boot on either an SSD or SSHD because it doesn't matter where stuff is on an SSD and an SSHD will cache the entire /boot folder after you restart the machine three times.
thanks, informative vid
Hi :) I cannot find '/' and 'home' flags in my partitioning tool (Gparted). I have only boot, diag, esp, hidden, irst, lba, lvm, palo, prep, raid. What should I choose to make my partitioning similar to yours?
Use the partitioning toll in the installer... Gparted can't add mount points like that. It just creates partitions. The mount points are created at install. :)
@@EzeeLinux I resolved my problem thanks to your advice. Take care :)
Rather useful video, ta. I take it that this method works on any flavor of Linux, not just Ubuntu based?
+Toran J. Shaw Yes, it will work anywhere. The partitioning tools might be different, though. :)
+Joe Collins Good to know, ta!
+Joe Collins The Linux Help Guy channel got taken down have any idea why.
+TheEnderknight If it's who I think it is, then he may have moved his channel to WindowsHelpGuy!
Thanks for the great video! AS a newbie this was so helpful. I have a question tho...
Bearing in mind I have a spare laptop and this is all in the interests of experimentation and learning...
When setting up partitions during install on a 500GB spinning drive I have :
/boot 512mb ext2 primary
/ 25GB ext4 journalling primary
/swap 10GB primary
If I try to set /home as 100GB and leave the rest of the drive unallocated, the unallocated part becomes 'unusable'
If I allow the /home partition the remainder of the drive I can use it all. Why is this??
The MSDOS Master Boot Record (MBR) will only allow you to allocate 4 primary partition. Make the /home partition a logical partition and then you can add more partitions within the logical partition. More info here: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1617750
Ah I thought it may be to do with the partition type! I'll have a look at that link--thank you. Is it possible to change a partition from Primary to Logical after it has been created or will I have to delete the partition and then create a new one?
You have to create new partitions. :)
Hello Joe I find your videos very informative and you are a very very clever Guy I would like to ask and I know you don't like d u a l booters but I am fighting with a method in which to do a disc image using clonezilla but with the variation of restoring this disc image to a larger drive my question is I'm using Linux Mint 18.1 xfce if I were trying to install a larger HDD what would I need to do? I like the idea up having a swab drive because I use and would appreciate any commentary with regard to a particular backup program call R e d of which I use consistently and works very well and the same drive for which I backup my ext4 petition which is linux and I've used it for a long time so if I want to increase a new drive can you direct me to some linked take into account the swap partition and allow for a larger HDD with with gratitude I thank you
You need to watch this: ruclips.net/video/BisJBC93sjQ/видео.html
i have a 465 GB hd ,what numbers should i put there for the first partition (ext4)? and for the 2th partition?
25 GB for root and then swap and the rest for /home/ Skip the /boot partition. :)
Hello 👋 when do I need efi partition?
If your machine has UEFI instead of regular bios... In that case, I find it's best to just let the installer automatically partition the dixk and edit it later. Either way, It's more complicated.
great video!!! thankz
thank you it very good
Hey Joe help please: I have not been able to update Arch in VirtualBox (not enough room and it has 20 GB)(Win10 btw) and this is in three different PCs. I think I just discovered the problem. Going over my notes I see I went with sda1 9g; sda2 2g and sda3 9g. Why I even have an sda3 is beyond me. Anyway, can I safely alter those such that sda1 gets the lion's share without having to start all over again? I have a really nice install. I don't even care if I have an sda3. Please give me the recipe and thanks. I need the recipe because I have forgotten so much. I launched GParted and see the following in the gui (but I cannot unmount any of the three partitions (it says it's busy) and I can't change the size using either the slide-bar or by typing in a smaller size for say sda3):
Partition File System Mount Point Size Used Unused
/dev/sda1 ext4 / 9.00 GiB 8.10 GiB 921.57 MiB
/dev/sda2 linux-swap 2.00 GiB 0.00 GiB 2.00 GiB
/dev/sda3 ext4 /home 9.00 GiB 611.73 MiB 8.40 GiB
What gives? What is going on? I thought maybe the slide-bar wouldn't work because it first has to be unmounted, so I tried that and it cannot be unmounted! Thanks
Your best bet is to re-install. While it's possible to expand partitions, the way you've laid out the drive makes that a bit difficult. You can try but it may not work because you'd have to move starting points and that usually changes the UUID of a partition.
Sad to hear the comment about uefi at the start, gone are the good old days of computing when you could turn off UEFI/TPM/Secureboot and just shrug. Although there were maybe a couple reasons before for GPT + UEFI (windows goes ahead and snags 2 primary partitions, that only leaves one primary for one BSD or Solaris) Windows 11 is going to insist on UEFI + the works, sucks because I've had so much trouble even these days getting bootable usbs to be consistently recognized on UEFI BIOS.
Need help while installing Linux mint, I am getting this error "the partition /dev/sdc2 assigned to / starts at an offset of 512 bytes from the minimum alignment for this disk, which may lead to very poor performance"
This means that the system thinks you have an SSD that is not formatted correctly. Let the installer format the disk or ignore it if you don't want to wipe the disk entirely.
Thanks..@@EzeeLinux
I changed hard drives so I thought I'd give this method a try. I chose Linux Lite 2.8. The computer works but I messed up. Yesterday I was looking at my partitions and noticed that somehow I ended up with /Boot Ext4 instead of 2. And I set my swap to 81 gig. Last night I booted into my gparted live CD and fixed the swap and home partition. Is there a trick to fix the boot partition? lol
+gregorylock I was just now looking at partition scheme through the gparted that is installed with Linux Lite. It is telling me that the /boot is set to ext2. Then I brought up fstab in gedit and it also tells me that the /boot is ext2. There is probably a bug in the gparted version that is on my CD. However the swap number I really did mess up on. No problem it's fixed now. *roles eyes.
Hi, maybe a stupid question but is it possible to assign SWAP memory after installing linux? Because I dont want to reinstall Linux all over again.
You can create a swap file. help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
Joe Collins Thank you. I thought it isn't possible, thank you for replying.
Me with almost 5tb in my laptop. A large disk like 250gb😬
4:00 Just a time stamp, nothing harmful.
Is a /home directory absolutely necessary?
Yes, it's part of the system. If you do not create a separate partition for it it will appear under /. :)
I've been using Ubuntu for the past year and a half, it even updated from 15.04 to 15.10 and my root partition has not even reached 10GB. In my current configuration I have a 120GB SSD where the root partition is mounted, and a 500GB HDD where the /var, /home and swap partitions are mounted. I feel like I'm wasting my SSD cause I'm only using like 8% of it.
What would be a better configuration for my system? I'm planning to update to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in April when it gets released and I will make a clean install, so I may as well change all my partitions.
+Javier Portillo The way you've got it now you're not getting much of a performance boost from the SSD since you put /var on the HDD along with /home and swap. Basically, you're getting a faster boot time and application loading but not much else. How much data do you have in your home folder? If it's more than 100 GB than you're going to have to put /home on the spinning drive. If it's less, you could put the whole system on the SSD and use the HDD for storage but then you'd have to make that drive automatically mount at startup by adding it manually to the fstab file.
Here's what I'd do to get the best performance and still have the HDD mounted as the default /home partition: Mount / on the SSD and go on and let it use all the space. Yeah, you're not going to use but 10 per cent of it but the drive will last longer because it's going to have plenty of room to rotate write cycles. I'd put swap as the first partition of the HDD and then use the rest of the space for /home.
You can enhance performance by adjusting swappiness so the system will only actually swap when it's just about out of physical RAM. Setting at 10 or 15 will do the trick nicely.
askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness
Yes, putting /var on the HDD will reduce write cycles on the SSD but it will also slow things down quite a bit. The way I see it, you'r e only using 10 per cent of SSD to begin with and allowing the system to use it for logs will speed things up quite a bit.
One more thing to do is to open the Disks utility, find 'Drive Settings' in the 'More Actions' menu (it looks like a gear or three or four horizontal lines up in the top right corber) and set the write cache to ON for both the SSD and HDD. That should speed things up even more. You can go on and do that now. I bet you'll see quite an improvement.
Keep me posted. :)
+Joe Collins SSDs are getting cheaper, so I guess I should stop worrying about the write cycles and put the /var directory on my SSD. In the meantime, I will back up all my stuff before updating.
Thanks a lot for your answer! :D
When you say memory, you mean the RAM of the machine? I'm confused. My laptop has 16 GB of RAM so what is my ideal swap space?
You can get away fiwth using 2 GB but this is an old video. Ubuntu now automatically sets up a 2GB swap file and so does Linux Mint 19
@@EzeeLinux I'm about to install Linux mint. So just to keep it safe I will do a 2gb swap space.
Many thanks for this well explained video Joe. Another step towards my amicable divorce with Windows.
tried this with linux mint 19.2 on a modern i5 computer and it told me i don't have a uefi partition and machine probably won't boot. So went with erase and lvm. hopefully i can setup a swap later.
Applied the settings for my 2 GB ram laptop acer aspire 5738. If I want to install 64 bit linux later should I just change ext4 partition that has / or create new partitions(currently installing 32 bit because of 2 GB Ram ) ?
Install 64 bit now... 32 bit is losing support right and left these days. :)
Joe Collins i install 17.3 32 bit, ill buy 2 gb sdram soon then ill install it 18.1 64 bit
64 bit will run fine and probably faster than 32 bit with 2 GB of RAM as long as the CPU supports it. No need to wait until you get more RAM. :)
Thank you.
Why root partition is a logical drive ? others are primary type ?
They should all be primary unless you want to setup a logical partition.
1 GB means 1024 MB, so a little more than 4 GB will be something like more than 4096 MB.
i have tried this several times and it fails. saying you need to go back and make a EFI partition????
This is not for computers that are using UEFI boot... If yours does, let the OS installer do the partitioning. :)
@loretopam Just let the installer do the partitioning. You may hive to run it twice. :)
Want to know 512 MB is enough for boot partition ?
Yes but 1 GB would be better. :)
Damn, a guy that talk like a human and not like a computer, that's rare.
hey I'm using Windows XP and now i want to change my OS to linux lite and i don't want to lose my Data except drive c's where my XP is installed so what should i do please help me out
Copy all of you personal data to an external hard drive and then put it back in once you've installed Linux. You should be running backups like that on a regular basis anyway. :)
Joe Collins hehehehehe no other options 😅
Can we make Separate Partitions like we do in windows for C,D,E drive
You can have as much storage as you like. You mount it somewhere in the file system. :)
@@EzeeLinux Can You have A video Regarding that
My drive is.2TB with OPEN SUSE 12.2 RAM 4GB - and I then USE 16.500 GB [RAM x 4 Times + abt 100MB). This means I n e v e r run out of RAM and IT WOULDN'T GET OUT OF MEMORY FAULT, BUT MAKE IT A PRIMARY PARTITION.
det
The /boot - I make, whatever, a 512MB similar as You did and also a Primary partition.
Next make REST OF HDD an EXTENDED PARTITION which gives You about 1.82GB.
Make 3 x 20 GB logical partitions, with names as: /usr (*) 20GB;
/home abt 40GB and /temp 20GB (or /var); the last is /upd (**) 20GB
* then you need NOT to reinstall a
fully functional "wine" directory with complete this install.
** Optional with download of abt DVD x 2 updates. Install from this directory - if possible.
The rest would be about 1.2GB which are quite enough for even a
server install.
73's de Gunnar sm6oer
tannk you sooooo much
so i wanna wipe mint of my laptop and install arch +openbox
the hd is 500GB
dev sda1= ext2 boot, size 5GB
dev sda= 2 ext4 home partition 490 gb
dev sda 3 4gb swap space. I have 4GB of ram
does this look ok? (Keeping this video in context).
Thank you :)
You missed the root partition. It should look like this:
sda1 = /boot ext2 512 MB
sda2 = / ext4 25 GB
sda3 = swap swap 4 GB
sda4 = /home ext4 470 GB
Help! OS loader not found, what next?
i use ext 4 (64 bit KDE linux mint) i always use smallest swap file possible as iv never seen it used on any amount allocated so its quite strange lol
+Jay Mee Ext4 for a seperate /boot partition? It will work but you just don't need the journal... :)
i use ext 4 on all of them :) some things can only work right on etx 4
+Jay Mee Like what? The only thing in the /boot partition is the kernel and grub files....
www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/05/ext2-ext3-ext4
you'd find more max file size and better faster performance :D
yer but main drive i use ext4 is what i mean generally lol