What size partition will I need for installing OS 11.1 and other compatible applications? (I intend to create a separate partition for data).
WinXP Pro (OS only) requires at least 25 Gb (for instance). Does OpenSuse require a comparable amount of space?
Also: Is ext3 the preferred format option?
Any orientation provided will be greatly appreciated.
TIA,
dhinds
If you plan on having a separate partition for user data & settings (a “/home” partition) you should be fine with a partition smaller than your Windows XP partition. Personally, I install openSUSE on a 8.5 GB partition. I’ve installed all the software I need (even quite a bit I rarely use) and only use 50% of the partition. I have a separate /home partition for user data & settings.
You may want a larger system partition depending on what you plan to do - if you plan on having a full build system for developement and packaging then you should have a larger partition. Similarly if you do not want a separate partition for /home, then you will want to give openSUSE more space so your documents/downloads/music/etc have room. You should be aware however that for most people a separate /home partition is highly recommended.
As for filesystems, Ext3 is a fine choice for most people.
If you have a partition that holds mostly large files then XFS might be a better choice. Conversely, ReiserFS is well known for its efficiency with very small files. Personally, I use ReiserFS for my system partition and Ext3 for my data partition, but Ext3 for everything is just fine.
If you have a separate /home partition then Ext3 is definitely a better choice than ReiserFS if you need access to that partition from Windows. There’s software you can install that lets Windows read & write to Ext2 & Ext3 partitions. There are no read & write tools for ReiserFS in Windows, tools for reading are available but not writing.
I hope that answers your questions 
Partitioning can be discussed to no limit
You probably want one partition for / and one for /home, if you use the system as a desktop machine.
The entire install will be no more than 2 or 3 GB, but keep in mind /tmp also resides on the / partition, so make it bigger. I have a DVD writer in my laptop, so I leave room for two temporary ISO files and a lot of logs and crap. Means, my / partition is 20GB.
All the rest is /home here.
Having a separate partition for home is nice when you upgrade. You can just ditch the / partition, reinstall and keep using your data on /home.
Again, there are good reasons to have more partitions, e.g. for /tmp or for /var, but IMHO it is a waste of disk space for a normal desktop machine.
> Also: Is ext3 the preferred format option?
Yes. I wouldn’t touch reiserFS with a ten foot pole (once bitten…)
Uwe
I’m using 11.1 KDE4.2 x86-64,on my notebook with 160GB HD. I use xfs on both /root & /home partition,everything run smooth.
After installation,suse took around 3GB of space in /root.
Thank you ReferenceSeete, buckesfeld and marcoslav for your informative responses.
I now understand how much space Open Suse and it’s apps require and that space for temporary files must be considered.
Does that mean that OSuse can’t be configured to use a separate partition for virtual memory? If that can be done, I suppose the format for that partition would have to be compatible with Linux. Is that so?
Regarding partition formats, both access to stored data from other OS’s and maintaining file integrity are important, so it’s good to know that tools that allow access to data stored on Ext2 & 3 partitions from Windows, are available.
As for maintaining file integrity (preventing data loss): Since I’ve lost data from FAT32 partitions in the past, I don’t format partitions with it any more and have (but haven’t yet used) an application called NTFS Anywhere, which (Paragon-Software claims) provides access to NTFS partitions from Linux (and earlier versions of Windows). It’s not freeware, however.
Can anyone shed any light on how NTFS and the various Linux partition types compare in terms of protecting data?
Another subject of interest is using Wine (or ?) to run a couple of Windows Apps. from Open Suse. Particularly, I depend on EccoPro -(a PIM), and The Bat! (an email client) and have used both for a long time); but that may be somewhat Off Topic for this forum.
buckesfeld wrote:
> Having a separate partition for home is nice when you upgrade.
>You can just ditch the / partition, reinstall and keep using your data on /home.
Right, and OS’s are more likely to become corrupted and require reinstallation than data.
> Again, there are good reasons to have more partitions, e.g. for /tmp or for /var, but IMHO it is a waste of disk space for a normal desktop machine.
Also - as I understand it, if more than four partitions are installed on the same drive, data loss is more likely.
Still another theme I wish I knew more about: The advantages / disadvantages of the various Desktops (KDE 4.1, KDE 3.5 Gnome 2.24, XFCE, Minimal X Window, etc.).
Opinions?
Lastly, this is the first subject I’ve posted to a Open Suse Forum and the responses received have resolved any doubts I may have had regarding the sponsorship of Novell and their connection with Microsoft.
Open Suse users represent an international community whose knowlege, good will and culture is consistent with the best principals motivating the free, open code, mutual help software movement and I’m glad to be part of this group.
Posted from Guadalajara
I too am a recent convert to openSuse and would like to offer this warning:
I accepted the openSuse installer’s defaults, which gave 20Gb to / , 2Gb swap, and the rest, 60Gb or to /home. My / part was full within a week, and I don’t have a lot of programs. I did however add KDE4 KDE 3.5 AND Gnome,as I wanted to them try out and compare.
So, I shrunk my /home partition and extended my / partition using paragon, and succeeded in corrupting irrecoverably my install. I am now back in windows. When I next install I shall make the / partition 50Gb, just in case. I must be doing something wrong if you guys are installing to 8.5 Gb etc.
I too am using Paragon. Can you tell me what went wrong?
TIA
20GB is normally plenty. I’ve allocated 24GB of which only 8GB is used. Even if I were to install another DE, I doubt it would increase the usage much. Why didn’t you track down where the usage went? Maybe you had lots of messages in log files. Or in one case someone had quite a few Xen images. Without tracking the problem down, there’s no saying that the problem will not recur with a larger /.
ken_yap is right, something definitely went wrong for your 20GB partition to fill up within a week - even with you trying those three DEs. I think log files are the best bet, on my initial install of openSUSE 11.1 there was a problem with zypper.log (you can find it under /var/log/). That file ballooned in size until it took up the whole partition. Deleting the file solved the issue.
@ dhinds
openSUSE (and Linux distros generally) set up a separate partition for virtual memory (aka “swap”) by default. Windows uses a dynamically resizable swap file by default. There are pros and cons both ways, although it is possible to create a (fixed size) swap file in Linux.
As for the best filesystem for data integrity…in my experience this sort of thing tends to breakdown into a bunch of anecdotes of “that fs can’t be safe I lost data with it, this fs is safe”, “huh? You mean this fs? I lost even more with it. You’re mistaken that one truly is safe! Just use setting X instead of Y”.
The absolute best solution? Back-up your data on separate media. I don’t put it in bold to be rude, but truely that’s the best solution. It’s not that Linux filesystems are notorious for losing data, but backing up your data is simply smart computing practise.
But to answer your question concerning filesystems as best I can…if you want the best for file integrity you can use ext3 with the journaling mode set to “journal”. There are two other options, “ordered” and “writeback”. “journal” uses full data+metadata journaling, “ordered” uses metadata journaling & transaction grouping, “writeback” is just metadata journaling. Traditional wisdom is that Ext3 performs better as you move to less & less journaling with the one caveat that “journal” mode can be really fast under certain loads. ReiserFS also offers those three options for journaling. However using Ext3 with “Journal” mode plus the standard periodic fsck check is about as good as it’s going to get.
The other thing to consider when it comes to filesystems is support. Some tools and abilities are available with certain filesystems but not others.
NTFS…If you use Windows and shutdown incorrectly, Linux will consider the partition “dirty” and refuse to mount the partition unless you either a)force it (not the best option) or b) return to Windows and do a proper shutdown. Also the common NTFS-3G Linux driver doesn’t support have complete journaling support under NTFS.
Ext3…is not journaled under Windows. So you run a risk if you’ll be in Windows a lot accessing Ext3. Of course you can always run fsck if you lose power in Windows while accessing the Ext3 partition.
XFS…cannot be read from Windows. Also an XFS partition cannot be shrunk (it can be made larger though). You’ll need to delete the partition and then create another one at a smaller size if you ever decide your XFS partition is too big. Conversely, Ext3 & ReiserFS can be resized to be both smaller & larger without filesystem destruction.
So after all that, the simple advice is: Back up your data, and use Ext3.
One more thing. I don’t mean to say buckesfeld’s advice is wrong, but you do not need to keep room for temporary iso files on your root partition. You can change the folder your burning software uses for temporary data.
Of course, you know your computer use best: If you have a tendency to take your /home partition to the limit, or need room for a lot of temporary data beyond iso files…then it makes sense to guarantee yourself the room to hold a DVD iso or two on your root partition.
I use the /home partition for temporary isos. Reason being, I have at least 2 distros installed at any given time. So to maximize HDD space, rather than giving each distro install its own dedicated allotment, they all use the common /home partition for temporary iso files . Although if you have one of those huge HDDs available these days, it may not matter to you either way. As buckesfeld said, “Partitioning can be discussed to no limit :-)”
On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 09:16 +0000, dhinds wrote:
> What size partition will I need for installing OS 11.1 and other
> compatible applications? (I intend to create a separate partition for
> data).
>
> WinXP Pro (OS only) requires at least 25 Gb (for instance). Does
?? Is there an XP SP3 with a 24GB Free Cell or something?
> OpenSuse require a comparable amount of space?
Uh… yes… uh… no… err…
openSUSE will probably fit well under <1GB… but a
typical install will probably be in the 4-5GB range.
Windows XP is less then 2GB AFAIK.
>
> Also: Is ext3 the preferred format option?
ext3 is an option… it is the default now.
reiserfs is still supported. reiserfs (v3) will
officially be deprecated in 12 (again, AFAIK).
IMHO, the future belongs to either reiser4
(yes… I said it)… or btrfs. Ext4 is just
an ext3 with some of the nice ideas found
in xfs/reiserfs.
The recovery is automatic since NTFS-3G 2009.2.1 without any user intervention: NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver Release History
Also the common NTFS-3G Linux driver doesn’t support have complete journaling support under NTFS.
Journaling won’t be fully supported. It’s more trouble and no use. Journaling was introduced and successfully used when disk controller and on-disk caches, multi-layer caching storages didn’t exist. Today they are obsolete and can cause more damage because the underlaying layers can reorder requests and ignore write barriers.
Sure you can, but it was more an example; software usually defaults to /tmp and honestly when I look at /tmp, I have no idea what all the stuff sitting there comes from, and I don’t care.
20GB shouldn’t be a problem these days, and I have always been on the safe side with it.
As I said, “partitioning” is as good a topic for debates as “Which is better, KDE or Gnome?”
Uwe
My / partition filling up discussed here:
System load and SWAP - openSUSE Forums
Impatience got the better of me I’m afraid; So…
My woes with Paragon and re-sizing are documented here:
after making a partition bigger can’t boot anymore - openSUSE Forums
If I re-install to 20 Gb, how do I keep an eye on it filling up?
What would happen when it is FULL?