Dual boot with W10 on old All-in-One

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi, This AIO with core i5 400M and Intel HD 4600 has one SSD with 4 original partitions:
sda1 - EFI system partition / 100 MB / fat32 / boot, esp
sda2 - MS reserved partition / 16 MB
sda3 - Basic data partition / 223 GB / ntfs
sda4 - Recovery (?) / 518 MB / hidden, diag

I reduced sda3 to 111 GB with a liveCD and gparted, creating an unallocated 112 GB space between sda3 and sda4 for LEAP 16 (had to disable secureboot in BIOS to boot the liveCD).

I’m unsure about:

  1. There is very little data in this machine, mostly e-mails (windows only uses 65 GB overall), so I’m not worried about splitting OS and /home in separate partitions. Would 20 GB for /root be enough, because of snapshots?

  2. Should I format two new partitions for the OS (btrfs) and /home (XFS) before installation or is it straightforward to do with the new installer? Can I even divide the free space between sda3 and sda4? I remember, vaguely, that MBR had a limit of 4 primary partitions, but this is UEFI.

Sorry about the noob questions :grin:

2

Also:

  1. 100 MB for sda1 is OK?
3

It depends on which software you install, on your snapshot policy, on update frequency. There is no one size to fit all. Several VMs I have with Leap 15.6, Leap 16 and Tumbleweed consume between 16 and 25 GB. It is mostly default installation (although over time I may have installed something additionally).

I’d say, 40GB is the minimum to avoid issues. Or you need very carefully tune software and snapshot policies.

4

On a Leap system, that is enough. But if you ever switch to Tumbleweed, make sure that you grub2-efi for booting. The Tumbleweed default is gr ub2-bls, which needs a lot more space because it stores the kernels in the EFI partition.

Your disk is probably using GPT partitioning, which allows many more primary partitions.

5

It’s possible to forego snapshots and BTRFS to reduce required space considerably if desiring to maximize available space for a separate /home. On PC I’m typing from now, I have /home on a separate filesystem, and / on EXT4:

$ df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p8   18G  7.2G  9.1G  45% /
$ rpm -q kernel-default | wc -l
12
#

Without so many kernels kept, my freespace would be considerably larger. On most of my other computers, all of which save one are multiboot, I have / on 8G or less EXT4, several x86_64 on as little as 5.6G, and 32bit (Tumbleweed) mostly on 4.8G. I don’t install much software I don’t have use for, so have recommends disabled, which saves a lot of space on / if so configured from the outset. IOW, how much space / needs varies widely.

6

Before you start, find out whether it’s supported:

knurpht@Lenovo-P16:~> ld.so --help | tail -5

Subdirectories of glibc-hwcaps directories, in priority order:
  x86-64-v4 (supported, searched)
  x86-64-v3 (supported, searched)
  x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)
knurpht@Lenovo-P16:~>

It should at least give:

  x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)
7

Thanks to all that replied, those are excellent recommendations.

I think I’ll go with btrf 20GB for root, ext4 for home, and keep an eye on snapshots. XFS is good, but has resizing limitations (can’t shrink)
The processor is a i5 4200M (typo on the OP), Haswell arch. It supports v2.
The main point was the EFI partition size. This box will not use Tumbleweed, so it should be OK.
About recommended packages, item 8.35 here has a nice explanation.

About item 2 of the OP, what’s your experience with the new installer partitioner? As windows is already in the same drive, I don’t want to inadvertently bork it.

Thank you very much!

8

@brunomcl on the Storage page, you need to read the warning about deleting partitions (the Windows ones), then you need to select and change the option to “Do Not Modify”.