I am new to Suse and am planning to install opensuse 12.3 on my new laptop. It"s a toshiba U940-11T.
I am opening this thread for those who would like to buy one of of the toshiba U940 models.
The first question I have is about partitioning the system.
The comp has:
One 750g SATA hardrive
One 32g ssd drive
12g of memory (4+8).
Ideally, I would like to use the SSD for the operating system and the sata drive for my home folder.
This is what I have in mind for the partitioning at the moment:
SSD: /boot and /
SATA: /swap (24g twice the physical memory) and /home.
If we already have the laptop
Did we boot the live cd or dvd and check what YaST partitioner says ?
YaST is a real whiz kid and does suggest some default recommendation based on your configuration
I’ve got “only” 6 GBs of RAM, don’t have a swap space. And 24GB of swap is useless. It’s probably never going to be touched. Suspend/Hibernate are features I don’t use, since a normal boot is a matter of seconds.
I have read many different views on this over the years.
IMHO if one wishes to have a fully functional suspend feature, IMHO one needs to have one’s PC’s swap at LEAST equal to one’s PC’s RAM (which is 12GB in this case). If a suspend to RAM is not important, then one can have a swap MUCH smaller.
Most notebook/laptop/netbook users that I know, like to have a fully functional suspend feature.
I have heard this particular view countless times over the years but when i installed 12.2 or 12.3 YaST suggested me a swap of 2Gigs when my RAM size is 4 Gigs(Gnome System Monitor conforms this). System seems to be working fine with swap size half that of RAM size.
i do have very few applications open and it is suspending well on both 12.2 and 12.3 from the suspend menu item on GNOME “user menu”. Probably it is suspending to hard-disk
Thanks for your feedback.
Looking at the different comments, I assume that I can start with:
/ → 20Gb on ssd
/swap → 12g on ssd
/home → 750g on sata drive.
Is 20gb enough for opensuse? Will install gnome, firefox, libreoffice and probably a few other software.
It depends. I have a GNU/Linux user group laptop with a 40GB hard drive that has a dual boot between winXP and openSUSE-12.2 tumbleweed. winXP has 20 GB, and openSUSE 20GB (for both / and /home - in fact I don’t have a dedicated /home partition on that laptop).
In contrast on my desktop PC I have 30GB assigned to / and I have 1.1 TB assigned to /home. Currently I have only 8.5GB available on / with 21.5 GB full of programs.
I typically assign from 20 to 25 GB on test partitions for /.
Wrt space for swap, the only real argument I have seen for modern PCs to have swap equal to RAM is if the RAM amount is small, or if one wants to ‘suspend to disk’ and one typically uses a LOT of RAM. Here is one article on swap, and the table they give wrt amount of swap is something I have seen repeated elsewhere: Linux: Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space? , with different rules of thumb:
**Here is one proposal (for a desktop PC)
**
Swap space == Equal RAM size (if RAM < 2GB)
Swap space == 2GB size (if RAM > 2GB)
And here is another proposal (for a desktop PC)
Swap space == Equal RAM size (if RAM < 8GB)
Swap space == 0.50 times the size of RAM (if RAM > 8GB)
And here is another proposal (purportedly coming from Red Hat for RHEL 5) for a desktop PC (server)
Systems with 4GB of ram or less require a minimum of 2GB of swap space
Systems with 4GB to 16GB of ram require a minimum of 4GB of swap space
Systems with 16GB to 64GB of ram require a minimum of 8GB of swap space
Systems with 64GB to 256GB of ram require a minimum of 16GB of swap space
From what I have read, the above recommendations are for desktop PCs and servers where suspend to disk (that one may use in a laptop/notebook/netbook) is not a consideration.
/swap → 12g on ssd - i am wondering whether placing swap on ssd will be a good idea as from whatever OS knowledge i have i believe that swap space will be used by OS for keeping “page” files in addition to the RAM. This may lead to increased reads and writes onto the SSD. Also using a file system like btfrs(indexing/compression,backup) might be bad for a SSD .
Nice comment. I would prefer to put it on the sata drive if possible as it will let more space for the root. I think I’ll try first to put it on the SATA.
From the btrfs wiki:
**Is Btrfs optimized for SSD? **
There are some optimizations for SSD drives, and you can enable them by mounting with -o ssd. As of 2.6.31-rc1, this mount option will be enabled if Btrfs is able to detect non-rotating storage. SSD is going to be a big part of future storage, and the Btrfs developers plan on tuning for it heavily. Note that -o ssd will not enable TRIM/discard.
I have not used Linux for a long time. What is the best file system to use? Opensuse uses btfrs by default?
I am not a OS expert. But that was what i learnt about paging when i did my graduation. Then again i might be wrong YaST should give you the best option when you open the LIve ISO. I suggest you download the Live ISOs first for whichever desktop you prefer (KDE or GNOME) and then boot into the LIVE iso first and check whether your hardware(sound,network card etc) works. Then reboot and install . That kept me out of trouble free with Linux for over 3~4 years.
I am a Linux newbie(for over 3~4 years) too. Point is Linux is evolving very fast.( /usr merge, systemd, wayland, GNOME Shell, KD plasma, Unity, Cinnamon etc… Listing these makes my brain want bottled oxygen). openSUSE as far as my Live ISO (12.3,GNOME) is concerned did not offer me btfrs. It offrred me ext4 and i took it. older openSUSE installs offered ex3 not too long ago. You can choose to use btfrs though. Many found it quite useful. You may want to look at this thread fro all the pros and cons https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/478909-new-users-beware-using-btrfs-filesystem-4.html
Done the first level installation.
I removed the existing partition (including the existing partition to manage raid on software level).
I had to install /boot partition on the sata drive.
So I have:
/boot → 512Mo on sata
/ → 32g on ssd
/swap on sata
/home on sata
Works well. I disables secure boot in the bios too as I didn’"t want to test it.
To boot with a usb stick, I had to disable usb3. There is a usb2 port on the comp but it was not working with the usb stick. By disabling usb3 in the bios, I was able to boot from the stick.
I enable it again once the installation was finish.
Wifi/Bluetooth/Xserver works out of the box. Now need to tune. First task is to make the FN keys work.
No success with the fn keys.
Only volume +/- works out of the box.
Toshiba_acpi kernel is loaded.
I’ve googled a bit but can’t really find a “simple” method to follow in order to set them. Anybody experienced the same issue with a toshiba laptop and got some result?
YaST should give you the best option when you open the LIve ISO. I suggest you download the Live ISOs first for whichever desktop you prefer (KDE or GNOME) and then boot into the LIVE iso first and check whether your hardware(sound,network card etc) works. Then reboot and install . That kept me out of trouble free with Linux for over 3~4 years.