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27-03-2010 10:02 PM
Another suggestion, if Scylla can stand it.
It's worth doing a bit of googling about Linux file systems and boot loaders - I honestly barely understand either, but find it useful to have vague ideas of what's going on at the back of my mind.
It's also worth looking up primary, extended and logical partitions. Essentially, any one hard drive can only hold four primary partitions. Windows, bless it, doesn't understand logical partitions - Linux, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to install to either a primary or a logical partition.
Linux's typical minimum partition requirements would be a large partition for the operating system and data, and a swap partition (which serves much the same function as Windows's "page file" - a temporary home for stuff that apps need and that don't fit into RAM).
Linux partitions don't generally use the same file systems as Windoze. Although modern distros are quite capable of reading from and writing to both FAT and NTFS partitions, they actually need to be installed to one of the Linux-friendly file systems. Extended file system (or ext, for short) 3 is very common; ext 4 is now with us.
They are "journalling" file systems. As far as I can tell, this means that anything you write to disk is first written to the journal, then to the appropriate file. The advantage of this is that a crash or power interruption does not corrupt disk data, and there's no need to run a disk check afterwards. Very sturdy and user-friendly systems, and hugely forgiving.
Most distros will simply format their space with their default file system during installation. Mint 8 uses ext 4, and Mint 7 ext 3 for instance.
I've not tried Reiserfs (a file system developed by a chap called Reiser - logical enough, I guess) or any of the other varieties - but there are all sorts of possibilities to play with.
If you google further, you'll find all sorts of suggestions for the most effective partitioning schemes for Linux. Remember that you can create enough logical partitions within one primary partition to keep all the bits of your Linux OS happy. But for more detail, please ask ej - still a weak area of mine.
What is worth while is giving the Linux part of your hard drive at least a root partition (for the distro and its apps), and a home partition for data - plus, of course, a swap partition.
Unless you're really going to go mad with apps (and there are some worthwhile ones available), a root partition of about 8gb should more than suffice. How large you make the swap partition depends upon what you read! I go for twice the installed RAM - but this old desktop, with 1gb of Ram, never seems to notice the lack of swap. And the lack of swap is due to me c****ng up a cloning operation, which seems to result in my having to start up swap manually - which I never remember to do.
I suspect Easeus might not be able to create ext file systems. This is not a problem. Once your computer's all backed up/restore disks dug out just in case, you could use Easeus to shrink your Windows partitions (making sure there are no more than three, if they're primary) - then use GParted to create an extended partition on the remaining space. This extended partition (nothing to do with the "extended" in the file systems!) can then be further divided into logical partitions as you desire - typically five to eight gigs root ("/"), one or two gigs swap and the rest home ("/home").
Even a major distro like Ubuntu or Mint will live quite happily on a fifteen or twenty gig drive. Linux doesn't have the Windoze need for 12 or 15% of the drive space for system restore (admittedly a useful feature, but hugely more likely to be needed in Windows than Linux anyway), nor the 15% free for defragmenting.
However - it is difficult to resize a partition "on the right side of the disk" (see the Easeus and GParted graphic representations of disk space - a real pain to move data from right to left) once everything's installed - so worth doing a little thinking about how much space you're likely to need for each system before installing...
Sorry about the essay - really just a few things to think about and google further. As I said before - in the final analysis, it's worth doing your homework until you can't bear it any longer, then going for it and seeking help as and when required.
And it really is great fun.
It's worth doing a bit of googling about Linux file systems and boot loaders - I honestly barely understand either, but find it useful to have vague ideas of what's going on at the back of my mind.
It's also worth looking up primary, extended and logical partitions. Essentially, any one hard drive can only hold four primary partitions. Windows, bless it, doesn't understand logical partitions - Linux, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to install to either a primary or a logical partition.
Linux's typical minimum partition requirements would be a large partition for the operating system and data, and a swap partition (which serves much the same function as Windows's "page file" - a temporary home for stuff that apps need and that don't fit into RAM).
Linux partitions don't generally use the same file systems as Windoze. Although modern distros are quite capable of reading from and writing to both FAT and NTFS partitions, they actually need to be installed to one of the Linux-friendly file systems. Extended file system (or ext, for short) 3 is very common; ext 4 is now with us.
They are "journalling" file systems. As far as I can tell, this means that anything you write to disk is first written to the journal, then to the appropriate file. The advantage of this is that a crash or power interruption does not corrupt disk data, and there's no need to run a disk check afterwards. Very sturdy and user-friendly systems, and hugely forgiving.
Most distros will simply format their space with their default file system during installation. Mint 8 uses ext 4, and Mint 7 ext 3 for instance.
I've not tried Reiserfs (a file system developed by a chap called Reiser - logical enough, I guess) or any of the other varieties - but there are all sorts of possibilities to play with.
If you google further, you'll find all sorts of suggestions for the most effective partitioning schemes for Linux. Remember that you can create enough logical partitions within one primary partition to keep all the bits of your Linux OS happy. But for more detail, please ask ej - still a weak area of mine.
What is worth while is giving the Linux part of your hard drive at least a root partition (for the distro and its apps), and a home partition for data - plus, of course, a swap partition.
Unless you're really going to go mad with apps (and there are some worthwhile ones available), a root partition of about 8gb should more than suffice. How large you make the swap partition depends upon what you read! I go for twice the installed RAM - but this old desktop, with 1gb of Ram, never seems to notice the lack of swap. And the lack of swap is due to me c****ng up a cloning operation, which seems to result in my having to start up swap manually - which I never remember to do.
I suspect Easeus might not be able to create ext file systems. This is not a problem. Once your computer's all backed up/restore disks dug out just in case, you could use Easeus to shrink your Windows partitions (making sure there are no more than three, if they're primary) - then use GParted to create an extended partition on the remaining space. This extended partition (nothing to do with the "extended" in the file systems!) can then be further divided into logical partitions as you desire - typically five to eight gigs root ("/"), one or two gigs swap and the rest home ("/home").
Even a major distro like Ubuntu or Mint will live quite happily on a fifteen or twenty gig drive. Linux doesn't have the Windoze need for 12 or 15% of the drive space for system restore (admittedly a useful feature, but hugely more likely to be needed in Windows than Linux anyway), nor the 15% free for defragmenting.
However - it is difficult to resize a partition "on the right side of the disk" (see the Easeus and GParted graphic representations of disk space - a real pain to move data from right to left) once everything's installed - so worth doing a little thinking about how much space you're likely to need for each system before installing...
Sorry about the essay - really just a few things to think about and google further. As I said before - in the final analysis, it's worth doing your homework until you can't bear it any longer, then going for it and seeking help as and when required.
And it really is great fun.
