what is root partition?

[Young]

Hello there,

Can anyone here tell me what root partition is? I am a total newb who's trying to install Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. I have already created a 10GB space and a swap partition using partition magic, but somehow during the installation process, the GUI gives me the message that I dunt have a root partition. How do I create this root partition? Currently using windows XP Pro with SP 2 installed. Thank you in advance.


Young

[Ethyriel]

The root partion is /, the... root of the filesystem. As in, everything else stems from it. You'll want to choose to mount / to your 10GB, and don't forget to assign your swap.

[Stormblazer]

The partition that Linux is running from, referenced as /
It's the topmost directory.

[Young]

To everyone who replied to my post,

Thank you so much for your quick reply, I owe you big time. Just have a question to Ethyriel by the way, you mentioned something about choosing to mount / to my 10GB, and assigning my swab. Excatly how would I go about to do that? Is that something that I have to do during the installation procedure? Thank you in advance again.

Young

[Stormblazer]

/ should be mounted at boot, if it doesn't, it didn't boot. In other words, you shouldn't need to mount it yourself, because your system wouldn't boot if it didn't get mounted automatically.

As for the SWAP partition, it's like virtual ram on Windows, but in it's own partition. It should be about equal to your RAM if you have more than 512MB of RAM, and double the RAM if you have equal or less than 512MB. But that's just a general rule, there's no real restrictions, those simply tend to work well.
To activate the swap partition manually, run "swapon" with the device name that refers to the swap partition.
You can also add it to /etc/fstab.

[Ethyriel]

Well, yeah, it's mounted automatically at boot, but during installation you have to choose where it does this.

The Ubuntu installer should give you the option of automatically partitioning the whole drive, or partitioning manually. Assuming you have other partitions on this drive, you want to do so manually. You can skip creating partitions since you did so in partition magic, but you need to match partitions to mount points (which is a directory).

Sorry, it's difficult to explain without referencing the installer.

So what you'll need to do is choose a partition, and then there's a menu that has things like /, /boot, /usr and so on. From this, for your 10GB partition, you'll want to choose /. Then there's another menu with things like ext3 and ReiserFS as well as probably ext2. I'd suggest ReiserFS, but ext3 may be a bit more reliable. And, actually I think this is the first menu (which will ungrey the others), you'll want to choose format this partition.

Now you need to setup the swap partition, and I forget which menu this is in exactly. I think the same one you used to format the partition for the last one (the first menu?), you'll want to choose swap, or make swap space, or something like that. This is like the virtual memory in that other operating system.

Sorry, it's been a couple months since I used this installer.

[Young]

Hello Stormblazer,


Thank you for your generous reply. Just have some few more questions.

"To activate the swap partition manually, run "swapon" with the device name that refers to the swap partition. You can also add it to /etc/fstab"
What do you exactly mean by this? I especially don't get the part " adding it to /etc/fstab"

Also, here can I find cfdisk? I am thinking about repartitioning the hdd because a friend of mine told me partitioning the hdd with PartitionMagic isn't a very great way to start.

Thank you.

Young

[Young]

Hello Ethyriel,

Thank you for your advice. Lemme give this a shot and see what happens. I will let you know. Anyhow, thank you.

Young