First time installing Ubuntu: Partition question

Hi everyone,

I recently bought a new Inspiron 1520 with the help of this website, and now I am looking to play around with dual booting Ubuntu and XP Pro on my old laptop. It is an Inspiron 1150 2.66 Ghz Pentium 4, 512Mb ram, and 40Gb hard drive. I have a couple questions though.

Primarily, I am wondering about how to partition my drive. Right now the drive is simply set up as ~37Gb single Windows XP Pro partition with ~26Gb free. Ideally I would like to make a partition for all my documents, pictures, and music that could be accessed from both operating systems (this would need to be FAT32 correct?). Currently that is approximately 19Gb of data.

So I am wondering what partitions I need to set up and what size I should make them? I know I need "\" and a swap partition but how big should "\" be? I had planned on 512Mb for swap. Also, do I still need a "\home" partition if I have a shared partition for data? Also, which partitions need to be logical vs. primary?

Anything else I should know before I install Linux? This will be my first real exposure to Ubuntu or Linux besides booting up on the liveCD for a half hour so any advice would be helpful.

Hope you guys/gals will be able to help me, I appreciate it!

 

I am accessing my ntfs windows partition through Fedora 7 and it's working fine.

The easiest way to do this is to free up some amount of space on you hard disk and while installing ubuntu choose the option for "use free space on the disk and create default layout"

 

Linux has no problems reading from Windows partition, be it NTFS or FAT32. Writing on NTFS partition is somewhat more tricky though. Also, while you don't necessary need /home partition, you will still need some space for use in /home, as all files that are created/edited by users, such as your Firefox plugins, go there - these files are usually relatively small. Also, if you plan to use Wine, then you will want fairly large /home. Personally, I found having separate /home partition to be very convenient, so I recommend you to create /home partition regardless. Finally, if you want to have multiple Linux Distro installed, then you may want to have separate /boot partition as well - however, having multiple distro probably is not very practical with your HDD space.

About sizes - 512mb for /swap is good. I don't think / usually takes more than 7-8gb for normal desktop use (sans /home) unless you install everything. However, you will want to have some more extra space, since Ext3 perform better with some free space available.

Alternatively, as gr81 said, you can let Ubuntu do it automatically. I have no experience with automatic partitioning, so I cannot comment about how well it works. For the purpose of learning, it probably is better to do it manually, though.

Other than that, I cannot think of anything to add, really. Oh - although some people like Automatix for installing packages, I don't recommend it. You can usually add files by Synaptic or add/remove program, or find .deb file at Getdeb website. It tends to be safer and you will have more control over what you are installing that way. Have fun!

 

britackle,

I do not wish to send you on a cook's tour, but here are some sites I found helpful:

1. http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4269/1/
2. http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/15835.html

Also make use of the ubuntuforums.org if you have other issues.

All the best, and welcome to Linux.

 

Yes this would be the best way to go.

 

That neat. Guess I better put more thought into my triple boot.