Partitioning

[freddo63]

I'm getting rid of Win7 for good because as far as I see it 8 is worse than any they've ever made, and besides which, I can't afford to buy a new laptop to handle it. Anyways, I'm much more comfortable now with Ubuntu and am planning on wiping the drive to redo my partitioning, since i didn't know what I was doing before. I hope this is the right place for me to ask this. I want to triple boot, Xubuntu, Backtrack, and FreeBSD.

Here's what I want to allocate so far and I'm not really sure how much I will allocate for FreeBSD, but my current plan will leave about 100GBs on my 250 GB drive:
Xubuntu BackTrack
/ 2.5GB / 2.5GB
/usr 40GB /usr 15GB
/var 4GB /var 5GB
/tmp 10GB /tmp 5GB
/home 40GB /home 20GB
swap 4GB swap is shared with the other one

Anyways, I intend to use Xubuntu for normal everyday use and then play around with BackTrack and begin learning about security auditing. I also want to put in FreeBSD to learn UNIX . I intend this only for my own personal use, and I got these sizes from the recommendations from the ubuntu online manual (if that's what it was... =/)

I hope someone can give me yes or no on whether this sounds good as soon as possible, because it's 7pm here and I hope to have at least Xubuntu installed sometime before 10pm tonight. Also, I wonder if creating a partition for /boot so that the boot manager can be changed as necessary when I install the other two operating systems. Also, I intend to install Xubuntu first, then BackTrack, and then FreeBSD. Does that sound like an alright order to go in?

Thank you guys so much for all the help you can provide me with!!!

[nothingspecial]

Xubuntu BackTrack
/ 2.5GB / 2.5GB
/usr 40GB /usr 15GB
/var 4GB /var 5GB
/tmp 10GB /tmp 5GB
/home 40GB /home 20GB
swap 4GB swap is shared with the other one


Hi, you really don't need all those partitions. One / partition would be fine. You might want a seperate /home or a data partition but partitions for /tmp, /usr and /var are unnecessary.

[ibjsb4]

You may find a data partition useful.

http://www.googlubuntu.com/results/?cx=006238239194895611142%3Au-ocqbntw_o&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=data+partition&as_qdr=all&sa=Google+Search&lang=en

[freddo63]

Hi, you really don't need all those partitions. One / partition would be fine. You might want a seperate /home or a data partition but partitions for /tmp, /usr and /var are unnecessary.


Alright, so that only makes things more complicated I suppose? What about a /boot for the triple boot GRUB that will probably get replaced a couple of times? And if I do a /data, can that be a single one for both Backtrack and xubuntu? and recommended allocations? So does the /data take care of whatever programs I want to install via the package manager? Such as games and other things?

and any specific order I should install the OSes in?

[oldfred]

You cannot share /boot, and should not share /home although if systems are very close some have said it works (at least for a while). Many settings in /home may conflict with different versions, if doing an upgrade to a new version it adds new settings, but then old version may get confused.

Programs are in / (root) normally but some can be installed in /home.

[Bufeu]

Hi, you really don't need all those partitions. One / partition would be fine. You might want a seperate /home or a data partition but partitions for /tmp, /usr and /var are unnecessary.
Why not? If you have more than one drive you actually want to decide where to put /tmp, /usr and /var.

[freddo63]

You cannot share /boot, and should not share /home although if systems are very close some have said it works (at least for a while). Many settings in /home may conflict with different versions, if doing an upgrade to a new version it adds new settings, but then old version may get confused.

Programs are in / (root) normally but some can be installed in /home.

Ok so am I mistaken in thinking that /boot holds the bootloader? Can you tell me what order to install these three OSes if I should want all three to show up in the bootloader, or does it matter?

Ok fine don't share /home, but /home or /data?

[freddo63]

Why not? If you have more than one drive you actually want to decide where to put /tmp, /usr and /var.

Yes sir, but I don't have more than one drive, I just want to partition things, and heard that separating those makes it easy to repair stuff later. However, since I will be the only user on my laptop, I have an inkling that one or more of those really are unnecessary.

[oldfred]

Herman goes the other way and has just /. He does not even use swap as a partition so eveything can share the same unused space.

Herman on advantages/disadvantages of separate system partitions post#3
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1410392

[freddo63]

Herman goes the other way and has just /. He does not even use swap as a partition so eveything can share the same unused space.

Herman on advantages/disadvantages of separate system partitions post#3
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1410392

Cool, so it looks like I'm going to be doing just that, having a single /, although I doubt I won't have a swap partition, because frankly the swapspace programs sounds a little iffy to me from their description (esp when I saw the 44gb thing in their test run). Besides, I've read that BackTrack can break if you install too many extra things not from the same repositories, and so I figure, why not just have a 4gb swap and be done with it. Oh and should I go with Reiser or ext 3 or 4? what are the pros and cons between those or should I google that?

Anyways, that still leaves one question, is there an installation order I should follow or is that just for windows, since microsoft is such a bum? would it be good to have FreeBSD on the first partition or does that matter?

Oh and I suppose a thank you is in order for all of you who posted above!

[oldfred]

I have not kept track of the BSD, but some where are year or two ago someone posted than one of the BSDs did not play well with Linux. They suggested a separate drive. I do think BSD has to be a primary partition and has its own file system, so I assume that is part of the issue.

While ext4 is not always first it is near the top in almost all cases. Only if you have very specific file sizes (like a media server) may another be better.
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - Benchmarking All The Linux File-Systems
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_fs&num=1
Large HDD/SSD Linux 2.6.38 File-System Comparison: EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, NILFS2
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2638_large&num=1
Tuning Solid State Drives in Linuxcheckbox ssd
http://cptl.org/wp/index.php/2010/03/30/tuning-solid-state-drives-in-linux/

[Bufeu]

Yes sir, but I don't have more than one drive, I just want to partition things, and heard that separating those makes it easy to repair stuff later. However, since I will be the only user on my laptop, I have an inkling that one or more of those really are unnecessary.
Yeah, separating thing making it's easier to repair something. I recommend to at least put /boot, /tmp and /home on different partitions.

[Herman]

Yeah, separating thing making it's easier to repair something. I recommend to at least put /boot, /tmp and /home on different partitions.How?

It's easy enough to chroot into a one-piece installation and run most commands that a person might need to use for repairing almost any major operating system problem.
Splitting the installation up into separate partitions makes setting up a chroot environment quite a bit more complicated, (and unnecessarily so).

Besides that it's easier and faster to maintain a single file system and it's easier to recover if necessary, and easier to make a single back up and restore a single partition from a single backup if that's ever necessary.

How can making the operating system more complicated by splitting it up into many partitions make maintenance and repair tasks easier, simpler or faster?

[freddo63]

How?

It's easy enough to chroot into a one-piece installation and run most commands that a person might need to use for repairing almost any major operating system problem.
Splitting the installation up into separate partitions makes setting up a chroot environment quite a bit more complicated, (and unnecessarily so).

Besides that it's easier and faster to maintain a single file system and it's easier to recover if necessary, and easier to make a single back up and restore a single partition from a single backup if that's ever necessary.

How can making the operating system more complicated by splitting it up into many partitions make maintenance and repair tasks easier, simpler or faster?

THANKS!!!!! I agree with Herman, although I would like to hear a response to his last question if possible.

[Herman]

Machtelt Garrels explained some of the best reasons I've seen in favour of multiple partitioning scheme for Gnu/Linux installations in Introduction to Linux A Hands on Guide (http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html). I agree very much with what she has to say.

Chapter 3 is particulary relevant to the current discussion, but I have enjoyed re-reading the entire book. The way I understand it she is recommending using separate partitions for servers, and for single user workstations pc a single / and swap is best.