cfogelberg
March 27th, 2009, 09:50 PM
Hi all,
I'm new to Ubuntu and somewhat new to Linux (I've used it and installed Mandrake years ago, but haven't done any administration level stuff since then).
I've just bought a Dell XPS M1330, and I'm going to dual boot it. Well, sort of triple boot it, but effectively dual (Vista, for Studio and some games; Dell Media Centre, to stop it crashing when I hit the media centre button by mistake; and Ubuntu, for everything else).
The question I am struggling with is how I partition my drive, especially how big each partition should be. I think I want to do something like this (320 gb drive):
2 partitions for Dell media centre (~300mb I think)
1 partition for Vista and programs(~30gb)
1 partition for / (~30gb)
1 partition for /swap (8gb, twice the ram I have)
1 partition for /home (how much?)
1 partition for /usr/share (all the rest)
/usr/share will be for things like photos, music, data files, just anything that I want to use on both operating systems. I think it should be an ext3 partition, and I'll install FS-Driver
Except for the Dell MC and Vista partition they'll all be ext3, and I'll install FS-View in Vista.
My questions are basically:
* Is 30gb enough for Vista? I plan to set it up, image it, then regularly restore the old image to keep it fairly clean.
* Is 30gb enough for /? I really have no idea how much space I might need, but given I'll be installing Matlab, Eclipse and other big applications it could need more than usual.
* How large a home directory do I need, given that most large files will be stored in /usr/share, as will quite a few of the documents that I might want to use in Vista (e.g. .tex files - I'll put cygwin in Vista)
* Is there better software for using extX in Windows than FS-Driver?
Thanks everyone for all your help, and I'm sorry if these questions have been asked a million times, but I couldn't find much by searching through the forums (only http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1045634).
Best,
Christo
I'm new to Ubuntu and somewhat new to Linux (I've used it and installed Mandrake years ago, but haven't done any administration level stuff since then).
I've just bought a Dell XPS M1330, and I'm going to dual boot it. Well, sort of triple boot it, but effectively dual (Vista, for Studio and some games; Dell Media Centre, to stop it crashing when I hit the media centre button by mistake; and Ubuntu, for everything else).
The question I am struggling with is how I partition my drive, especially how big each partition should be. I think I want to do something like this (320 gb drive):
2 partitions for Dell media centre (~300mb I think)
1 partition for Vista and programs(~30gb)
1 partition for / (~30gb)
1 partition for /swap (8gb, twice the ram I have)
1 partition for /home (how much?)
1 partition for /usr/share (all the rest)
/usr/share will be for things like photos, music, data files, just anything that I want to use on both operating systems. I think it should be an ext3 partition, and I'll install FS-Driver
Except for the Dell MC and Vista partition they'll all be ext3, and I'll install FS-View in Vista.
My questions are basically:
* Is 30gb enough for Vista? I plan to set it up, image it, then regularly restore the old image to keep it fairly clean.
* Is 30gb enough for /? I really have no idea how much space I might need, but given I'll be installing Matlab, Eclipse and other big applications it could need more than usual.
* How large a home directory do I need, given that most large files will be stored in /usr/share, as will quite a few of the documents that I might want to use in Vista (e.g. .tex files - I'll put cygwin in Vista)
* Is there better software for using extX in Windows than FS-Driver?
Thanks everyone for all your help, and I'm sorry if these questions have been asked a million times, but I couldn't find much by searching through the forums (only http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1045634).
Best,
Christo