I’m new to openSUSE, and I need help on manual partitioning.
I have a laptop with Windows 8.1 installed. I tried booting openSUSE 13.2 DVD and I’m stuck with partitioning. Currently, automatic partitioning is not possible. I have tried installing Linux Mint on the same laptop before with this partition:
EFI BOOT - 550 MB
/ (root partition) - 100 GB
/home (home partition) - approximately 600 GB
SWAP - approximately 8GB
I wonder how I would setup manually on openSUSE. I haven’t tried BTRFS on other distros, first time here on openSUSE. I wanted to use BTRFS for the feature “system restore”, or something like that.
How would I setup manual partitioning with BTRFS?
I still need around 100GB for the operating system and around 500GB for /home. I have around 350GB of data, music and videos so I need a huge and separate home partition. With 100GB for OS, Im just used with that on Windows so I opted for 100GB for the OS.
The problem is, how do I set this up now with BTRFS? And, should home be EXT4, or XFS?
Thanks.
Do those partitions all exist (EFI, root, swap, home)?
If they already exist, you can just re-use them. In the partitioning section of the installer, select “Create partitioning”. On the next screen, select “custom partitioning” (or whatever it is called).
Then, on each of those partitions, right click and select “Edit”.
For the EFI partition: Mount as “/boot/efi”. Do not format.
For the swap partition: Format as swap. Mount as swap.
For the home partition: Mount as “/home”. If it already has data that you want to keep, then leave it at “do not format”. Otherwise format at whatever you want (“xfs” or “ext3” or “ext4”).
For the home partition: Mount as “/”. Format as btrfs. (I didn’t use “btrfs” so I’m not sure. But I think the partitioner will then suggest a suitable subvolume structure).
If the partitions do not already exist, you might prefer to boot a “gparted” disk and first partition to your liking with that.
And make sure that you boot the installer in UEFI mode.
I didn’t answer that. It probably isn’t very important, so take your pick. Some suse folk are recommending that “ext4” not be used. They suggest “xfs” or “ext3”.
If no partitions exist and you are creating an EFI partition from scratch, then that needs to be formatted FAT (or, technically, “vfat”).
Not sure why you think you need 100 gig root? 40 gig, even with snapshots on, is more then enough unless you plan huge databases and even then it would be best to put them on there own partition.
Since a laptop I suggest a separate boot partition about 500 meg formatted ext4. There has been a little strangeness with BTRFS and waking from sleep. You may or may not run into it but a separate non BTRFS boot will eliminate the problem for sure.
I suggest you do some reading on snapshots, It may not be the magic you think it is.
Some of the booting problems with “btrfs” won’t happen with UEFI. But I had forgotten about that one (recovery from hibernation). So, yes, that’s a good suggestion. But use “ext2” rather than “ext4” for “/boot”. Grub2 software doesn’t read the file system journal, so better to not use one.
I agree that 100G seems excessive for “/”, though I don’t know the OP’s plans. But I decided to keep my answer as simple as possible, so I omitted mention of that.
Unfortunately, not all of the subvolumnes suggested by the partitioner are suitable. The last time I did an UEFI installation with a btrfs root partition and separate boot and home partitions I had to remove the boot and home subvolumes suggested by the partitioner.
those just act as mount points if not used