Partition Sizes and Suggestions on new laptop

[jimmyray]

I searched this site but found no very recent posts answering these questions.

Just called newegg and the new laptop is on the way with a 320G drive and pre-installed Vista. Will likely keep Vista despite the fact I haven't spent much time in ******* for about 10 years. Have no idea how much space Vista will need.

Have partitioned disks since Slackware 3.something. This will be my first Ubuntu install (actually Kubuntu since I like KDE.)

Questions:
1. Plan for partitions? What would you guys suggest? Thought I'd just have a root (/), /home and /swap.
2. What are some suggestions on the sizes? Will have some entertainment files on this laptop (mp3's,video etc...).
3. Can Vista read a ext3 drive or should I keep common files like documents on a separate NTFS partition labeled common or something and just use it to write files from linux to this drive? In the past the performance of writing to a NTFS drive was an issue but then again I have been using very old and limited hardware.

I have been reading all the articles on dual booting Vista and Ubuntu and it doesn't seem that horrible to set up.

Thanks for the time.
jimmyray

[Pumalite]

First of all allocate space for Kubuntu with the Vista partitioner first. Ahter that; you can use Gparted Live CD and make 3 'New' partitions in that free space:
10 GB for '/'
The rest minus your RAM for /home
The size of your RAM for /swap
You can make Vista deal with an ext3 partition with this driver:
http://www.fs-driver.org/
Gparted Live CD:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779
Burn the iso to disk and boot from it.

[jimmyray]

Thanks for the quick reply. Makes sense.

[sokopok]

I suggest you use RAM*1.5 for swap. You could get in trouble with suspend to RAM if you suspend with completely filled RAM (you need a tiny bit more than the actual memory for suspend).
I run Vista x64 on a 40GB partition (just when I need a reminder why I love Linux so much though).

[Pumalite]

He is right. 1.25 will do.