Hey I’m a newbie.I have a Sony Vaio E Series SVE15116EN with an AMD Radeon HD7650M Graphic Card. I installed the 12.1 version. I couldn’t change the brightness and couldnt connect to Wifi.I didn’t have the time to deal with it so i had to uninstall it.Now i want to install it again. What do i do?And also I couldn’t understand the partitioning thing while installing. It seemed kind of straightforward when I installed Ubuntu. And how much space should I give? I have a 500 gb hard disk and 4gb RAM. What’s the difference between partitioning and using VM? Would these problems go away if I use VM? I want to be able to switch over to linux completely in the future. Thanks in advance.
Hello, and welcome here.
But please, make a thread for every different question you have and do not mix them in one thread. In the end nobody will know anymore which post is answering which problem. And of course, your Wifi problem should have gone into the Wireless sub-forum. That is where wireless gurus are lurking to help you. And that is also the place to read he first few “sticky” threads whicch tell you waht ionformation you should provide with your problem description.
Partitioning is easy once you understand it.
You need to provide 1-2xmemory for the swap partition. I recommend 2X if you are on a laptop to provide plenty of space for sleep. note if you have a lot of memory and not on a laptop 2 gigs is probably enough for most usage.
You need 20-30 gig for root. that is where all the system stuff and programs go. If you are just expementing 10-12 gig is enough if not plaining on installing much additional software
For home whatever you plan to use. Usually the rest of the free space on the drive but that is up to you. plan on a lot of media files you will need more space in your home. Home is where all the users accounts data and config files go.
Note that home is optional as separate partition but then your personal stuff goes on the root partition. So plan accordingly.
a VM has virtual partitions but they exist as files on your host OS. So not sure what the question means.
To install a dual boot you need to re-size windows to allow space for the installer to load Linux. Note that it is best do do this in Windows but the installer can do it. The default settings in the installer create swap root and home partitions of appropriate sizes. This can be changed but if you do not understand the idea of partitions it is best to take the defaults. Always double check the settings that are being proposed to make sure 1) you understand them 2) the installer is not planing on doing something you don’t want. Never just click through like you were installing a Windows program. This is much more serious.
Note some makers are putting a 4 primary Partition on for a windows install the max you can have. But You can have more if you create an extended partition to hold any number of logical partitions. If your system has 4 primary partitions one must go to allow an extended.
Once you know what you have please ask here before proceeding if you don’t understand what you see.
If you’re not sure about paritioning and you don’t mind using the remaining free space on your disk whether you already have an existing OS or not, recommend you select "Suggest… " and accept what is given to you. The exception though is your current situation where you may have installed and don’t want to save what already exists… Install will by default keep what you don’t want
Probably the easiest resolution for you is at the partitioning step to select “Edit…” then delete the unwanted partitions then click “Abort…” and re-run Install from the beginning accepting the suggested Partition setup. Be careful deleting partitions, if any contain data like an OS you want to preserve you highly risk losing all of that without technical expertise.
If you feel brave enough to set your own partitions I recommend three partitions
Id. Format Size Mountpoint
sda1 SWAP 2GB
sda2 Ext4 25GB /
sda3 Ext4 Remaining /home
As for why partitioning or VMs, each are ways to isolate pieces of a running computer system or in the case of running different OS installed on the same hard drives.
HTH,
TSU
That only works when you first realy start the installation and only abort after you are sure it is loading the software. Beacuse the partitioning is only executed after you continue the real installation,that is after you say yes/OK (or whatever) to all the “do you realy want …” questions.
Don’t know if it’s a bug, but what you describe is what I expected but…
I discovered that partition removal is made <immediately> sometime before or when clicking the “Abort…” button. Otherwise no destructive changes were made like the new partitioning scheme I was considering or formatting.
Had me scrambling to find a utility that would restore the removed partitions… Once restored, the disk was bootable and data intact.
So, as I described in my prior post, IMO it’s sufficient to simply remove the partitions, when the Installer is next run it will find no intact partitions, so will offer a setup based on partitioning and formatting the entire disk.
TSU
What you describe looks too me as a serious bug.
In any case, using fdisk from the install DVD’s rescue entry seems much more easy to me then first go through all the install screens until you reach the partitioning.