How to leave the OS on one solid state hardrive and everything else, including packages, to another harddrive.

Hello jbowen,

It is a good idea to keep the OS in a separate partition or disk and the user files on another. The reason is not to keep the system virus-safe, but when you do a reinstall or upgrade, you keep your files intact. If you use two disks, then performance increases.

To do this, you have two option:

1- If you wan to transfer your existing system to the SSD, then you have to boot from a live CD, create a partition on the new drive, and copy everything friom your existing partition to the new drive with the rsync command. I'll give you more details if this is whant you want.

2- Do a clean install, and at the partitioning stage choose "custom", assign "/" as mount point for the SSD, and "/home" as mount point for the other disk.

I do not understand what you mean by syncing the drives... you want to have a working system installed on both drives?

As for what dpkg and .debs are, take a look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dpkg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_%28file_format%29

The add/remove application is just a front-end to apt-get, so the same software is available in both. You can install software either way you want, it is exactly the same. And don't worry, there's no such thing as a registry here.

Guillermo,

 Thanks for your answers, they have helped, but have inspired more. I'm
going to be doing a clean install on a computer I'm building. I do not own
the second hard drive but am thinking about including it in the build. Since
it will be the first install of an OS, I assume that I'd just install the OS
to the SSD ( assuming the SSD was first to boot) like I was doing a normal
clean installation, and as you said “'choose' custom and assign '/'...” All
of my media is stored on an external. Transferring the media to the second
drive shouldn't be a problem.

So the questions I now have are:

   1.

   When I enable access to all repositories, or apt-get applications, or
   change the firewall settings for example, I should be doing this all on the
   SSD hardrive designated for the OS, right? Should the second hard drive be
   for media and docs, or also programs, applications, etc?
   2.

   What I meant by sync them was : If the programs are on the second hard
   drive, will the SSD (OS hard drive) automatically access them and load them
   into the GUI?
   3.

   I don't know a lot about the what I'm asking about, could you explain how
   you would go about doing this, what would be stored on what drives, etc?

 Thanks again for your help,

 johnny

 p.s. I will post this to launchpad also so that others may use the
information.

Guillermo,

Thanks for your answers, they have helped, but have inspired more. I'm going to be doing a clean install on a computer I'm building. I do not own the second hard drive but am thinking about including it in the build. Since it will be the first install of an OS, I assume that I'd just install the OS to the SSD ( assuming the SSD was first to boot) like I was doing a normal clean installation, and as you said “'choose' custom and assign '/'...” All of my media is stored on an external. Transferring the media to the second drive shouldn't be a problem.
So the questions I now have are:

1)When I enable access to all repositories, or apt-get applications, or change the firewall settings for example, I should be doing this all on the SSD hardrive designated for the OS, right? Should the second hard drive be for media and docs, or also programs, applications, etc?
2)What I meant by sync them was : If the programs are on the second hard drive, will the SSD (OS hard drive) automatically access them and load them into the GUI?
3)I don't know a lot about the what I'm asking about, could you explain how you would go about doing this, what would be stored on what drives, etc?

Thanks again for your help,

jbowen7

For anyone following this post I found this information regarding installing another hard drive:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingANewHardDrive

Hi

You might find something helpful at the end of this thread
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/78671

Also it's worth noting this guides
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromWindows

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus
http://librenix.com/?inode=21

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

HI :)

Having the OS & programs all on one partition & then another partition for the linux-swap partition on one SSD-drive with all the data & settings on one partition on another drive is probably going to make your system hugely fast and very robust.

Of course 1 thing we really don't have to worry about in linux is viruses because great care is taken to build security into every level of linux, even into the ethos of it. No-one profits from viruses in linux, they would just slow development down and distract focus from much more intriguing, interesting and exciting work. Also the kudos or infamy and satisfaction that virus writers can only get in the Windows world from writing viruses is much more likely to be gained in linux by writing proper applications. Elegant code written in linux can easily be admired by a great many people but in Windows it would all get hidden away and code-writers tend to be treated with suspicion being barred from seeing too much of the bigger picture.

The Ubuntu OS & programs are best not split up into separate partitions and drives although if you really must then i'm sure it's possible. Mostly people just install their /home folder (that contains all the data and settings) onto a separate partition, better still if that's on a separate drive.

The big question then is where to put the swap? Since the ram & swap work very tightly together at the same time as constant read/writes are needed to the OS&progs it would normally make sense to have swap on a separate drive so that the read/write head wouldn't be forced to constantly bounce around between swap and OS&progs. Also the speed of read/writes to both swap and OS&progs is a key factor in how faster your OS runs. However SSD's work very differently and are very much faster so it seems perfect for putting both the swap and the OS&progs on the one SSD drive.

It's better to have the swap on a separate drive from the data because the data gets copied into swap caches so that it's queued up ready in advance of being called by the cpu into ram. It helps a lot if the read/write head that's dealing with data doesn't have to bounce backwards and forwards across the drive.

All this assumes you have low ram or high demands of course. If you have a lot of ram and just do text-editing then your swap space will probably never get used at all because ram will be able to cache all read/writes without getting close to being full.

Ubuntu OS&progs only needs about 5Gb, even that is very generous. The swap only needs to be about twice the size of your ram although it could happily be as small as ram.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
Which leaves you with a huge amount of empty space on your SSD-drive - perhaps for other OS's, other versions of linux or even other *nixs and possibly even Windows too?

Anway, i hope some of these random thoughts help - if they just make any sense that would be great!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

It's just occured to me that your 1Tb drive might be "raided"? Often the Windows world does something called a "software raid" which isn't really a proper raid array
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID

Since you 'only' own 1 drive at the moment then i would set it up like this assuming it's the SSD

sda1 2xRam Primary Partition, 'file-system' = linux swap
sda2 10Gb Primary Partition, file-system = ext3 for /
sda3 large. Primary Partition, file-system = ext3 for /home

This will make it easier to move the /home onto the new drive and then edit the fstab and all that nightmare lol. If it's the 1Tb drive then i would do the reverse

sda1 large, Primary Partition, file-system = ext3 for /home
sda2 2xRam Primary Partition, 'file-system' = linux-swap
sda3 10Gb Primary Partition, file-system = ext3 for /

This way you wouldn't need to resize the /home partition which is fraught and desperately slow at the best of times. Again this would help because on the new drive you could do a fresh install then get the programs list from synaptic and magically your new install would be just like the old one without all the fuss of the endless tweaking that we tend to do with a new 'toy' ;)

Anyway, i'm sure everyone else has their own suggestion for what's 'best'. There is only 1 'right' way and that's your own. Windows gives freedom from choice. Linux offers freedom of choice.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Thanks Tom for your help, you've answered many of my questions. I've learned a lot today from the links you provided. There is so much to learn about computer systems.

I don't remember coming across swap partitioning the last couple times I installed Heron or Jaunty, is this normally done automatically?
Also, this is the first I've heard of "swap", but I have been reading up on it today, and from what I found out, I don't need it if I'm going to be using 8 gb ram, right?
Also, from information you provided, I'm under the impression that Linux will utilize all of the ram in the computer, therefore the more ram I have the quicker the computer, or was that just for swap memory?- I'm still learning about this.
When I install a program from synaptic, or apt-get, does it download the files to / or /home or /home/username? In my case I would want it to download to sba2 (first harddrive second partition), right?
So far what I believe I should do is install my OS on the SSD and partition it to sda1 and sda2 where sda1 is the 16 gb for swap; sda2 is the remaining portion of the SSD for the OS. Now I would name this "/" and programs and system motification will be saved to this drive, ex, "/theprogramIinstalled." And the second drive (the TB) I will name /home, and this will contain all else (media, documents).
I've only been working with linux for about 4 months now, and none of it has been done on my computer ( I don't own one, that's why I'm building one). To accomplish the setup with the two hard drives I was planning on installing Jaunty on the SSD, then once that's working, I believe that I would want to then add the second hard drive ( i found this link https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingANewHardDrive). Now after I install this hard drive how do I name it to /home?
Sorry for all of the questions. But thanks for all of the answers, they really help and I've learned a lot.
johnny

Lol, 8Gb is huge!! Linux is unlikely to ever use all of it which gives you a good safety-margin against slow-downs and crashes. Not really an issue for linux but good if you are going to run a Windows inside a virtual machine also if you are going to run Windows on the other side of a dual-boot, or both.

Yes, the swap will have either been created automatically or else the installer might have decided not to bother with a swap given the huge amount of ram.

However, suspend/sleep/hibernate copies the contents of ram into the swap. The swap space is on the hard-drive so it's information is retained even when there's no power to the machine. The ram gets completely wiped by a power-down which is normally a good thing so that it can start up all fresh and ready to start a new session. With sleep/hibernate/suspend the idea is to continue from where you left off. Personally i avoid hibernate/suspend/sleep because it leaves the machine much more vulnerable and it's only fair to let it get a good rest. Some environmentalists claim that using it saves power but from running a machine on boat batteries i have found that just as much power is used for the whole session either way. I think they stop measuring before the machine has stopped using mains power.

So the upshot of all that is that you do still need just over 8Gb, 8.5Gb(ish), of swap just in case you use hibernate. However, it's a good idea to put that 8Gb at the far end of a normal drive or just anywhere you've got some space.

The rule of thumb "the more ram you have the quicker the machine" is only really relevant for much lower ram size. With 8Gb of ram the speed factors will now be mostly determined by things like Cpu speed, amount of L1 & L2 cache space on the Cpu (think of this as on-chip kinda ram), hard-drive read/write speeds to the OS&progs, read/write speeds of the ram chips perhaps even length & quality of cabling. These are almost entirely likely to be non-issues in your machine as it's likely that all these are pretty good too. The trick is in keeping the cpu temperature low, and also keeping the mbord quite cool too. Again i imagine that this is good on your machine.

Ok, good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Thanks Tom
Thanks Guillermo

Hi again :)

Programs get installed to / but Windows programs installed in Wine get installed to /home and i am not sure what happens in virtual machines. The question is less about where they are installed to but more about where do the read/writes happen?

I think there are a couple of folders, such as the logfiles folders, that could normally be usefully placed on a separate physical drive from the OS, or even mounted into ram on a ram-drive. There is an old Tom's Hardware bench-marking/destruction-testing that suggested the multiple rapid read/writes (as happens with logfiles) could be 'slow' on an Ssd but i think things have moved on a lot since then and are improving rapidly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_with_hard_disk_drives
Really tho i would keep things as simple as possible to start with and you're already considering options that are far more complex then you really need to worry about.

Getting a new drive and dealing with fstab and chown is a bit beyond me, really not my area at all. However, i think that having a /home partition separate from the / means that an entry for it appears in fstab - so when you copy /home onto your new drive then it should be a lot easier to edit fstab to point at the new partition, the fact that the new partition is on another drive is a minor detail that
sudo lshw -C disk
can help you with anyway. (i copied that from the link you gave me)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingANewHardDrive
it's a lot less complicated than it appears and i wouldn't even start worrying about all this for the initial install. If you want to have a look at an fstab on a linux machine then try

gedit /etc/fstab

although other distros will probably use some other text-editor instead of gedit so just replace gedit with whatever the distro uses. Some other popular ones are; vim, vi, nano. Note that by not opening this system-file with SuperUser rights it's safer to have a look at because i'm unlikely to accidentally change something and then save the changes ;)

Anyway, good luck and regards from
Tom :)

You're welcome, thanks Jbowen :))
Regards from
Tom :)

Tom,

I found an excellent review/article about SSD's (
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1 ) . It's long
(about 20 pages), but very informative, and compelling (at least for my
uses). It seems the SSD has degradation problems do to the way it writes and
deletes. From what I understand the drive can save a minimum of 4kb at a
time and delete a minimum of 512 kb at a time... I decided not to include an
explanation, it's on page 4, 5, or 6. But, from the result of the review,
even at the worst performance the SSD, when it's degradation is at it's
highest, most of the SSD's will out perform a VelciRaptor.. The OZC Vertex
seems to be an excellent drive, and it's worth looking into as a
OS/Applications Drive; you can pick a 30 GB Vertex up for 150$ at
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227468.

You mentioned that wine programs are installed in /home but that programs,
in general, are installed into / ; I would think then, that a program in
wine be installed to /wine/c:/programs/theprogram, or something similar to
that?

I'm going to continue with research. I'll let you know if I find any more
information on the topic.

johnny

Hi :)

Yes, the pathname for my Wine programs is

/home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files

but only Windows programs get installed there so it's only Windows programs that get installed into the /home folder. Typically, config settings will be in a text file like

/home/user/.neverball/settings/config/neverballrc

but the actual program will be stored elsewhere and the log-files and general activity will happen elsewhere, neither will be in /home. Note the "." in front of system folders so that these folders are considered "hidden", perhaps even "system-folders".

I think the main two points with SSDs is that speed is not relative to distance from the front of the drive and also that there's no read/write head moving from one area to another in order to read/write. Before all the blocks in a partition have been written to once, you do get a false impression of ridiculously fast read/writes but once this honeymoon period is over you have to settle for normal performance which is merely phenomenally fast. I'm not sure that saying it's over a certain type of other drive really does it justice. I get the impression that it would be like saying that a car is faster than going by foot, faster even than running!

Now that i have heard how large your ram is i'm not so sure about putting it at the front of the drive in a "Primary Partition". It would make more sense to stick it at the end of the drive inside a Logical Partition which would be inside an "Extended Partition". Partly that's because it's difficult for me to adjust to thinking about SSDs but also as a drive can only have 4 Primary Partitions - or 3 Primary and 1 Extended, the only way to have more than 4 partitions is to put all the rest in an Extended Partition. Given that you only need the swap to cover a scenario much more likely to happen to a laptop and very unlikely in a desktop machine it seems a waste to give the swap a Primary Partition. I think i would now be considering something like this

sda1 15Gb Primary ext3 for /
sda2 20Gb Primary ext3 for /home - temporarily. Windows Xp here afterwards?
sda3 large Primary for Windows inside a virtual machine again temporarily as fat32
sda4 14Gb Extended Partition, this can always be resized later if required
 . sda5 5.5Gb unallocated but ready to use for trying out other OS's, such as other gnu&linux distros
 . sda6 8.5Gb Logical Partition for linux-swap

Ok so i am not sure that virtual machines use real partitions, I'm completely clueless about that. I do think that Xp is worth having installed somewhere and it would be remiss to miss out on having Windows7 somewhere just to see what its like (assuming you don't have to pay a huge fortune to just try it out) - or at least have a decent space for it for later.

The main reason for setting up sda2 & sda3 in this scenario is to keep all the numbering neat and in the same order as the partitions appear on the drive. Sometimes i get a bit excessive about tidiness like that.

That is just my thoughts tho. You might well have a better plan :)

Anyway, thanks for the link to the SSD article :)
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Tom,

In your partitioning setup you only mentioned sda, but what about sdb, the
second hard drive?
I hadn't really thought about it but you're right, it would be wise of me to
have XP and/or Windows7, since I would benefit from being familiar with the
OS that the rest of the world is using.
I've decided to stick with 6 GB of triple channel ram (3x2gb) rather than 8
GB of dual channel (4x2gb); I believe it will be more efficient. Now as far
as the Swap is concerned, which at 6 GB of ram I may never use, I realized
that leaving the swap on a SSD partition would be detrimental to that drive
since it would rapidly fill the blocks up, that is if the swap was ever
used.
So there's a new dilemma--will the computer utilize swap if it's on another
drive, say sdb1 or sdb2?
Combining what you suggested with what I said, what do you think about this
setup:
sda= SSD ; sdb=some other Tb drive at 7200 rpm
sda1: 25 gb Primary ext3 for / ( i figured 25 since my packages/apps will
be here also)
sda2: 15 gb Primary nfts for / (Xp) (can i use nfts for this partition,
and could would it still be sda3: 15 gb Primary nfts for /
(Windows7) named /?)
sda3: 5-6 gb primary/extended for / (another distro)

then,

sdb1 for /home lots of gb
sdb2 for linuxswap 8.5 gb

Questions:
1) will my media and documents on sdb1 named /home still be accessible by Xp
and windows7 even if it's labeled /home, or would i have to label it
/c:/something/something?
2) Or, would I have to make a-whole-nother partition accessible by windows
and duplicate files to that partition?
3) can I format one partition with ext3 and another with ntfs?

**********************************************************************************************************

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Tom <email address hidden>wrote:

> Your question #79072 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/79072
>
> Tom posted a new comment:
> Hi :)
>
> Yes, the pathname for my Wine programs is
>
> /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files
>
> but only Windows programs get installed there so it's only Windows
> programs that get installed into the /home folder. Typically, config
> settings will be in a text file like
>
> /home/user/.neverball/settings/config/neverballrc
>
> but the actual program will be stored elsewhere and the log-files and
> general activity will happen elsewhere, neither will be in /home. Note
> the "." in front of system folders so that these folders are considered
> "hidden", perhaps even "system-folders".
>
> I think the main two points with SSDs is that speed is not relative to
> distance from the front of the drive and also that there's no read/write
> head moving from one area to another in order to read/write. Before all
> the blocks in a partition have been written to once, you do get a false
> impression of ridiculously fast read/writes but once this honeymoon
> period is over you have to settle for normal performance which is merely
> phenomenally fast. I'm not sure that saying it's over a certain type of
> other drive really does it justice. I get the impression that it would
> be like saying that a car is faster than going by foot, faster even than
> running!
>
> Now that i have heard how large your ram is i'm not so sure about
> putting it at the front of the drive in a "Primary Partition". It would
> make more sense to stick it at the end of the drive inside a Logical
> Partition which would be inside an "Extended Partition". Partly that's
> because it's difficult for me to adjust to thinking about SSDs but also
> as a drive can only have 4 Primary Partitions - or 3 Primary and 1
> Extended, the only way to have more than 4 partitions is to put all the
> rest in an Extended Partition. Given that you only need the swap to
> cover a scenario much more likely to happen to a laptop and very
> unlikely in a desktop machine it seems a waste to give the swap a
> Primary Partition. I think i would now be considering something like
> this
>
> sda1 15Gb Primary ext3 for /
> sda2 20Gb Primary ext3 for /home - temporarily. Windows Xp here afterwards?
> sda3 large Primary for Windows inside a virtual machine again temporarily
> as fat32
> sda4 14Gb Extended Partition, this can always be resized later if required
> . sda5 5.5Gb unallocated but ready to use for trying out other OS's, such
> as other gnu&linux distros
> . sda6 8.5Gb Logical Partition for linux-swap
>
> Ok so i am not sure that virtual machines use real partitions, I'm
> completely clueless about that. I do think that Xp is worth having
> installed somewhere and it would be remiss to miss out on having
> Windows7 somewhere just to see what its like (assuming you don't have to
> pay a huge fortune to just try it out) - or at least have a decent space
> for it for later.
>
> The main reason for setting up sda2 & sda3 in this scenario is to keep
> all the numbering neat and in the same order as the partitions appear on
> the drive. Sometimes i get a bit excessive about tidiness like that.
>
> That is just my thoughts tho. You might well have a better plan :)
>
> Anyway, thanks for the link to the SSD article :)
> Good luck and regards from
> Tom :)
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

Yes, lol. Linux is about freedom OF choice.

If you haven't yet bought all the ram and everything then i would make sure to buy as little as possible but get good quality & a large value stcik of whatever you do get - especially as it sounds like you are starting off without Windows. Linux is very efficient with ram so it's more important to have empty slots on your mbord to allow for future expansion. 2 paired sticks are meant to have significant advantages in performance but for linux even one old stick is likely to be plenty. I would consider getting just one stick of something quite decent that will last years. At some point in the future ram sticks will make what we use now look like a joke so it's worth having a potential for easily adding more sometime far off in the future ;) I'm not an expert on ram but it sounds like your plan is what i would aim for too.

Xp has the advantage that it works really quite well now and also it's quite likely that you have access to a legit copy to install. I'm not sure i would buy it tho. Scratch that - i know i wouldn't buy it but i wouldn't spend much on Windows7 either. I would only get either if i could get it at a good price, ie free or something.

Wierdly Ubuntu's gparted can't seem to make ntfs partitions and sometimes struggles a bit. I've posted a bug-report about this. The problem is not with GPartEd as even very early ancient versions on other distros have no trouble at all, as don't the ultra latest gparted's on other distros *shrugs*. That's the only reason i'm suggesting setting the Windows partitions up as fat32 temporarily - the Windows installers can do a quick format to change that to ntfs easily. It doesn't involve writing a lot of 0's to the partition or anything dumb like that, it's just a label in the partition table. Ubuntu can be made to deal with ntfs by installing "ntfsprogs" and "ntfs-3g", which begs the question "Why aren't these included as standard" lol, *sighs & shakes head*

I thought this as a starting layout

sda1 15Gb Primary ext3 for /
sda2 20Gb Primary ext3 for /home
sda3 large Primary for Windows inside a virtual machine temporarily as fat32
sda4 12Gb Extended Partition
 . sda5 5.5Gb unallocated, waiting to have fun with sometime as a sandbox
 . sda6 6.5Gb Logical Partition for linux-swap

and perhaps changing to this after you get the large data storage drive

sda1 15Gb Primary ext3 for /
unallocated
sda3 large Primary ntfs with a virtual machine continuing to use it
sda4 12Gb Extended Partition
 . sda5 5.5Gb unallocated still
 . unallocated

sdb1 large Primary for /home
sdb2 6.5Gb linux-swap

Note that Window can't read ext3 partitions at all, well except for shared folders seen over a network but that depends on the linux being booted into so that it can share stuff out. However Gadolinio just showed us that a /home partition can be formatted as an ntfs partition and then Ubuntu has no trouble using that - which gives the advantage that Windows can see it quite happily too. He showed a bit more than that too, see near the end of this thread
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/78407
Starting from his post "Waaaaiit" just after my answer that got marked as solving the problem there.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Hey Tom,
Actually I don't own a computer, I haven't owned one for a few years but
have had access to many (I'm the neighborhood Admin). The OS that I'm most
familiar with is OSX 10.4.. but I'm a curious tinkerer so I had to
transition to gnu/linux. I've got my 85 year old land lady set up with Hardy
Heron, and another computer inept neighbor with the same.
No, I don't have a legit copy of XP, but I do have a copy of the Gamer's
Edition XP Sp3 which is very nice and light (I think it's around 750 mb, but
I'd have to double check).

No, I haven't bought any of the hardware yet; i still have some research to
do, but it'll be top notch.

I've got good news for you:
Windows can read ext3 partitions. Well it reads them as an ext2 partition. I
just found this today: http://www.fs-driver.org/?

Problems solved, till tomorrow.

sda1: 30 gb ntfs xp or windows7 (if i can get a clean copy)
sda2: 30 gb ext3 ubuntu as /

sdb1: lots of gb ext3 ubuntu /home and shared
sdb2: 6 gb linuxswap

Also, I found out that all ubuntu settings are stored in /home, that means I
can reinstall ubuntu as many times as I ruin it, without having to go
through all the post-installation setup :)

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:36 AM, Tom <email address hidden>wrote:

> Your question #79072 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/79072
>
> Tom posted a new comment:
> Yes, lol. Linux is about freedom OF choice.
>
> If you haven't yet bought all the ram and everything then i would make
> sure to buy as little as possible but get good quality & a large value
> stcik of whatever you do get - especially as it sounds like you are
> starting off without Windows. Linux is very efficient with ram so it's
> more important to have empty slots on your mbord to allow for future
> expansion. 2 paired sticks are meant to have significant advantages in
> performance but for linux even one old stick is likely to be plenty. I
> would consider getting just one stick of something quite decent that
> will last years. At some point in the future ram sticks will make what
> we use now look like a joke so it's worth having a potential for easily
> adding more sometime far off in the future ;) I'm not an expert on ram
> but it sounds like your plan is what i would aim for too.
>
> Xp has the advantage that it works really quite well now and also it's
> quite likely that you have access to a legit copy to install. I'm not
> sure i would buy it tho. Scratch that - i know i wouldn't buy it but i
> wouldn't spend much on Windows7 either. I would only get either if i
> could get it at a good price, ie free or something.
>
> Wierdly Ubuntu's gparted can't seem to make ntfs partitions and
> sometimes struggles a bit. I've posted a bug-report about this. The
> problem is not with GPartEd as even very early ancient versions on other
> distros have no trouble at all, as don't the ultra latest gparted's on
> other distros *shrugs*. That's the only reason i'm suggesting setting
> the Windows partitions up as fat32 temporarily - the Windows installers
> can do a quick format to change that to ntfs easily. It doesn't involve
> writing a lot of 0's to the partition or anything dumb like that, it's
> just a label in the partition table. Ubuntu can be made to deal with
> ntfs by installing "ntfsprogs" and "ntfs-3g", which begs the question
> "Why aren't these included as standard" lol, *sighs & shakes head*
>
> I thought this as a starting layout
>
> sda1 15Gb Primary ext3 for /
> sda2 20Gb Primary ext3 for /home
> sda3 large Primary for Windows inside a virtual machine temporarily as
> fat32
> sda4 12Gb Extended Partition
> . sda5 5.5Gb unallocated, waiting to have fun with sometime as a sandbox
> . sda6 6.5Gb Logical Partition for linux-swap
>
> and perhaps changing to this after you get the large data storage drive
>
> sda1 15Gb Primary ext3 for /
> unallocated
> sda3 large Primary ntfs with a virtual machine continuing to use it
> sda4 12Gb Extended Partition
> . sda5 5.5Gb unallocated still
> . unallocated
>
> sdb1 large Primary for /home
> sdb2 6.5Gb linux-swap
>
> Note that Window can't read ext3 partitions at all, well except for shared
> folders seen over a network but that depends on the linux being booted into
> so that it can share stuff out. However Gadolinio just showed us that a
> /home partition can be formatted as an ntfs partition and then Ubuntu has no
> trouble using that - which gives the advantage that Windows can see it quite
> happily too. He showed a bit more than that too, see near the end of this
> thread
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/78407
> Starting from his post "Waaaaiit" just after my answer that got marked as
> solving the problem there.
>
> Good luck and regards from
> Tom :)
>
> --
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>

Yes, there is a lot to absorb about linux so it's easy to miss stuff first you you see it.

Your plan for sdb is looking good but the swap does need to be just over your ram size and it's unclear what people mean when they say 1Gb because really

1Gb = 1024Mb and
1Mb = 1024Kb and
1Kb = 1024bytes

but because machines have 10 fingers and humans don't (oops, i was going to correct the blunder there but then left it) we tend to find that at some point humans tend to round the extra 24's off the end. So what 1 program/set-of-stats quotes as 1Gb another might see as 1.024Gb. It's best to leave room for oddities like that if there's room ;)

With sda there's little or no point in having more than 5Gb for the / because unless Virtual Machines operate in a very weird way then it'll be almost entirely unused beyond 5Gb. Linux programs are tiny especially in comparison with Windows programs. Once you have the main OS and standard progs of a standard install then adding a huge amount more programs hardly uses up very much more drive space. When i suggested 15Gb it was mainly because you have such a large amount of drive space and it's vaguely possible that vm's might do something really weird.

If you are thinking of buying a raided drives then the best thing is to forget it. What the Windows world and hardware suppliers like to call "raided drives" is a complete con and very rarely a genuine proper hardware raid - but the software kludge and dodgy bios that makes 2 ordinary drives look like a raided drive to Windows is very much cheaper to set-up for hardware manufacturers and the term "raided drives" sounds cool, a good marketing ploy. It's very much cheaper and better to get 2 normal 500Gb drives or 1 normal 1Tb drive
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
Linux tends to not "play along" with this "emperor's new clothes" and has the habit of reporting these 'raided drives' as exactly what they really are - 2 separate drives with something dodgy in the bios.

The reasons why linux programs are so tiny is that they use what's already in the system. Take the standard install's IM program "pidgin" and the standard office program for creating presentations. Add a web-cam to your system and so install "cheese". Now suddenly the IM program and the presentation package both suddenly, magically, allow you to add streaming content from your web-cam - the one program added the functionality to all programs that could usefully use it. Most normal program have large % chunks of code such as libraries/codecs/fonts etc etc that are needed by a great many programs. In Windows those chunks would get re-written and added in to each program separately, perhaps shaving off bits or re-arranging things a bit because proprietary code isn't allowed to share and must re-invent the wheel each time. This means that if a flaw is found in a library then all other programs that use a similar library must determine whether the issue might affect them too and decide whether (or how) to patch/update it. Another problem with the Windows way is that each program has to separately open many of those similar chunks of code in Ram so multiple instances of very similar thing crowd into the ram instead of programs sharing one that's already open. In linux when you use a package manager to download and install a program you'll notice that it may ask for a few other packages such as libraries/codecs etc be installed because the program will depend on these in order to work - we call these "dependencies". However, it's also very likely that most of the dependencies of a program are already installed on your system with the standard install.

Installing Windows on a system isn't vital at all. In fact it's great to find that you don't need it at all - but it's also nice to have space set-aside for you to add things if you need them for some reason - gaming is about the only thing i can really think of for Windows although sometimes a particular piece of hardware or some weird office program might not be happy about working in linux. Personally i have enjoyed proper linux games a lot and am still slightly addicted to Wesnoth Campaigns :)

https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/installation-guide/i386/ch02s04.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/switching/preparing-hardware.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/installation-guide/powerpc/hardware-supported.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/hardware/C/restricted-manager.html

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)