how large should the partitions be?

[Nickoli]

I'm about to set up a dual boot Ubuntu 5.10 / Windows XP system, and I'm unsure about how large to make the partitions for the separate OS'. I have an 80 GB hard drive and was thinking of making 3 partitions: 1 for each OS and the other for my personal files. My question is how much room do the two OS' want in order to work properly? This is my first time using linux so any other advice on installing Ubuntu would be appreciated :)

Nickoli

[rspassey]

Uh, This is really personall preference. I wouldn't go with anything less than 20GB for each OS.

[rave]

depends on how much ram you have also available.
for linux, you require atleast 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have for your swap partition(e.g. if you have 512 or RAM, 768 MB of space should be taken into account into your partition space)

[Nickoli]

I have 512MB of RAM. 20GB of memory for each OS sounds high. Is that reasonable?

[rave]

well, okay. windows takes about maybe 5-6 GB. but when you add a good number of apps to it, probably might hit around 9-10 GB. so i would say 12 GB is enough for the windows partition

not too sure how much space Linux would take up.probably no more than 15GB itself.

it would be advisable and nice if you had a 3rd partition with just media on it

[Nickoli]

My plan was to use the third partition for all other applications, ie the windows OS will have its own system space, the Linux OS will have its own system space, and all my misc. programs would lie on the third partition.

[Nickoli]

just a quick question about file systems... Linux doesn't work fully with NTFS, so the Linux and misc. partitions should use FAT32 file systems, am I right?

[flawedreality5]

Correct! Make your documents partition Fat32 so Linux can see it as well.

[kilgoretrout]

A few things. First, you can't install most linux apps to a FAT32 partition so don't even try that. Reason - most linux apps assume installation on a linux file system which has a file ownership and permission structure that is simply not there in FAT32. FAT32 is fine for storing pure data but not for installing linux apps. Linux can read and write to a FAT32 parition but in so doing it superimposes a linux file system ownership/permission structure on the FAT32 partition from within linux. This is likely to be a real problem for most linux apps if you try to install on FAT32. As far as linux is concerned, leave the FAT32 partition for data only. You can, of course, install your windows apps there.

Re partition size - The base ubuntu install which includes a lot of apps probably wouldn't take up more than 3GB. Even loading up with a bunch of stuff, it's really hard to get over 7GB, especially if your storing your data(pictures, music, movies, ect) on that FAT32 partition. The only big exception is if you want to install some big commercial game like unreal tournament(which has a linux installer by the way); those can eat up several GBs all by themselves. 10GB should be more than enough for your linux partition.

There is a lot of folklore about the appropriate size of the linux swap partition. The rule of thumb use to be "swap size=twice ram". That was back in the old days when people typically had 64MB of ram. The rule has little relevance to todays high memory configurations. The truth is with 500MB of ram, you will rarely even go into swap running a linux system in a normal manner. Make the swap partition anywhere between 500MB to 1GB just to be sure but you will probably never need all that swap space.

[flawedreality5]

I agree with the swap partition. I've had mine at 512mb before with 1gb of ram and never had any problems.

[Nickoli]

Ahhh thanks Kilgoretrout, that clears up a lot of my questions. I can install Windows applications to the FAT32 partition, right?

[flawedreality5]

I can install Windows applications to the FAT32 partition, right?

Yes you can. But, as Kilgoretrout said, you shouldn't for Linux.

[Nickoli]

sweet, thanks guys

Nick