Partitioning recommendations

Mepis does not need to be installed on a primary partition.
So (unless your already have reached the max number of primary partitions) create an extended partition. In that extended partition then create the logical partitions that you need for Mepis.
Your size proposals for the root, home and swap partition seem not well balanced to me. Root 10 GB ext3, swap 1 GB and the remainder to /home ext3, since that's where all your data will go.

Regards, Ko

Ko Bros

5GB for ROOT and 500MB for swap is more than sufficient for your working needs. Remember MEPIS CD, with so many goodies, takes only 2GB on root partition. Swap is for catching temporary memory overshoots. But disk i/o is very slow, so when your system starts swapping the response will go down. A 500MB swap will take more than a minute to fill. Sufficiently long for you to perceive and take corrective actions .

Most of your personal data will be in the home volume, so you can leave the rest for this volume.

Thanks for the information. All the Mepis installations that I've done so far have been default installs that used the entire hard disk where the installer did all of the partitioning for me. I wanted to be sure that the Mepis installer didn't have any problems using logical partitions.

I've been thinking about trying to transfer my Windows 98SE installation to a virtual machine running under Linux. Would the virtual machine files be stored in the root file system? I like to install several desktops (KDE, GNOME, IceWM, Fluxbox, XFCE4, and Window Maker) to see how they work, and to have backup desktops setup and ready to use if any one desktop were to get hosed from a bad update or other problems. I also like to install various applications to see how they work. Those are the reasons why I was planning on making the root partition 20GB. Have I overestimated the amount of hard disk space that this will require?

GregB, if you create THREE partitions (root, swap, home), then all user stuff is placed in your user account on /home.

That is why, if you want to play around with different Linux distributions, you create a separate partition to mount to /home. The simple approach is to have only two partitions (root, and swap). In that case /home is simply a directory in the root partitions (not the same as /root). So if you have three partitions, the root partition does not need to be very big: 5-10 GB. And then you can save all the partition space to put into your user (/home) partition.

Keep in mind that Linux is not Windows. Windows likes to have EVERYTHING in one partition, and it's a PITA to try to do things otherwise (even though it's a very good idea). Linux, on the other hand, makes sure that system stuff stays in the root partition (various directories like /etc, /bin, /var...), and that user stuff is put down in /home/yourusername. So if you use a virtual machine of some sort, like VMware, or Parallels, or VirtualBox, there will be a sub-directory in /home/yourusername where it's all stored.

Likewise, if you want to use multiple desktops and/or window managers, their info is kept in "hidden" files. These are files or directories that have a leading dot, ".likethis". So, for instance, .kde is the controlling directory for KDE.

You may want to read through more of these forum posts, read the wiki, and check out mepislovers, (and some good Linux books) to learn more about how Linux is structures. It makes for good bedtime reading

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.

The largest package (OpenOffice?) is just a few hundred MB. Programs don't take up much space. Space hogs are video, audio, clip art, and package cache (in that order). I have seen 1300 packages taking only about 4GB (including 750MB for package cache!). Remember, Root gets overwritten everytime you install, so you don't want to put too much there. Cache your downloaded packages in /home volume somewhere so you can experiment with different desktops across installs.

From what I've read it looks like my proposed layout was allocating too much disk space to the root partition. Based on the recommendations, it looks like a 10GB root partition is what I want to go for.

I would have gotten back sooner but when the SimplyMEPIS 7.0 announcement was made I wanted to see what the new version was all about first. Is it a good or a bad idea to try to run the SimplyMEPIS final version and the next SimplyMEPIS version's beta on the same PC? I'm wondering if something like this would make it easier to go between versions?

Welcome back Greg.

Yes, if you plan on testing other distributions, or different revisions of a distribution, having another partition is a good idea.

The partition you use for swap does not need to be duplicated; it can be shared (one at a time) by all your distros. To protect your /home area, make it into its own partition, and use that only for your LIVE distribution. Then, create a new partition that's about 8-10 GB in size. That should be more than large enough to test things. Most distros will allow you to use that one partition to contain your home DIRECTORY (not partition). Since it's a test area anyway, it is safer to do things that way.

But, if you start playing around with multiple distributions get in the habit of backing up your stuff. There are few things as annoying as playing with some new operating system, and having it wipe your your "good stuff" because either you, or the operating system, didn't "play nice".

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.