size of partitions if multibooting?

[penguin2]

I have a question about partition sizes when you are multibooting.

I would like to know if 20GB partitions are an acceptable size. Is there anything to worry about with partitions around that size? I am not sure whether it makes sense to break it down further as some people have separate boot and/or home partitions. I guess if they are only 20GB in size, there is not much room left to divide further?

I am also wondering if it's okay to multi-boot four or five distros. Is that too many for a 160GB drive? My plan or idea was to multi-boot four or five distros until I decide which one I use the most or like best (well, best for an old notebook).

My only notebook, currently, is a Thinkpad T41. Here are some specs:
Centrino Pentium M 1.6 GHz CPU
ATI Radeon Mobility FireGL 9000 video card (aka RV250) w/ 1440 x 900 LCD res
Intel 2200bg wifi card
Intel ethernet LAN
160GB Samsung IDE/ATA HDD
2GB DDR RAM

Is that sufficient for assessing my hardware specs?

I know that the video card is only supported by the open source radeon driver and that the Intel wifi card requires specific firmware before it can work or operate.

I am not sure which desktop window manager I should use so I was going to install a distro that has each. LXDE, xfce, Gnome, KDE

Distros I plan to install include:
OpenSUSE - KDE
Mandriva - KDE (or Gnome?)
Ubuntu - Gnome (or xfce)
Mepis / Anti-X / Debian Testing - KDE or LXDE (depending on which one)
Fedora? (maybe similar to Mandriva?

That's at least four or five right there. I guess I won't have enough room to have them all at once but I'll choose five of those and install and check it out. Is 20GB each sufficient for all or only some of those?

I have Windows XP of 30GB and an extra 15GB NTFS partition so 45GB or so is already allocated. I have a 1.95 GB of swap already installed but maybe I'm using an extra 1GB there?


Anyway, last I looked, I had about 100GB or so left to play with so I thought around 4 or 5 distros could be installed.


Any ideas or recommendations? I use GParted to partition.

Thanks for any help.

[oz]

20GB partitions are large enough for most users, but some users might require larger, depending on their individual computing habits. Most distributions can run on a 10GB partition, but again, there might be some that would require larger.

Yes, gparted should work fine and is a great partitioning tool. I personally like to run it off of the Parted Magic LiveCD.

I'm not a big fan of running multiple Linux distributions on the same system, but others do it all the time. There are a few things to consider, such as will you share a common /home partition for all the distros, or will you give each their own /home partition, or perhaps you want to let each distro have its own /home folder within their respective root partitions?

Either way, we hope it all goes well for you!

[penguin2]

I don't know if I should share the /home partition. Probably not if I am using 'different' distros, for e.g. debian-based and then rpm-based.

I am only testing them out so I would probably redo things when I find myself more adaptable to a certain distro or system. I guess I am also testing to see if one is a bit more smoother on my notebook so I'm not leaning towards any one distro yet.

Would it be better to test them one at a time and allocate a larger chunk of disk to the distro? Currently, I divided the leftover space in half, more or less, and installed two distros in the space so they're about 50 or so GB each. Maybe that is a better way but will take more time since I'll be testing and then installing something different over top each time.

[oz]

I don't know if I should share the /home partition. Probably not if I am using 'different' distros, for e.g. debian-based and then rpm-based.

If you don't create /home partitions, the installer will put a /home folder within the root partition for each distro. If you do create a single /home partition, you might want to consider logging into each distro with a different username, so that the different distros don't cause conflicts within /home. The other option would be to have a separate /home partition for each distro, but then you begin cutting deeper into your available hard drive space.

In the end, you'll probably need to do some experimenting to determine the final route that you'll take with this. Of course, you'll be learning things that are good to know from all your effort.

[hazel]

If you don't create /home partitions, the installer will put a /home folder within the root partition for each distro. If you do create a single /home partition, you might want to consider logging into each distro with a different username, so that the different distros don't cause conflicts within /home. .

An alternative which I use is to have a home directory (not a partition) in each distro and keep your configuration files there but no data. All the data files are on a separate partition, which you mount on /home/data in each distro. And then you can use the same username for all of them. Make sure it's the same UID too; most distros these days use 1000 for the UID of the first user but Red Hat used to use 500 and Fedora may still do so. If you make sure all the UIDs are the same, you'll have access to all the files in /home/data, regardless which distro you're in or which distro you made them in.

[penguin2]

An alternative which I use is to have a home directory (not a partition) in each distro and keep your configuration files there but no data. All the data files are on a separate partition, which you mount on /home/data in each distro. And then you can use the same username for all of them. Make sure it's the same UID too; most distros these days use 1000 for the UID of the first user but Red Hat used to use 500 and Fedora may still do so. If you make sure all the UIDs are the same, you'll have access to all the files in /home/data, regardless which distro you're in or which distro you made them in.

I like that idea! Could I do it with an external drive? I do think if they're 20GB for the entire partition/system, that I'd have to be concerned with disk space (and running out). A separate partition (or even drive) and then mounting it to /home/data would avoid using up more disk space on the main OS drive.

Is this feasible/possible?

[oz]

An alternative which I use is to have a home directory (not a partition) in each distro and keep your configuration files there but no data.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say here:

If you don't create /home partitions, the installer will put a /home folder within the root partition for each distro.

...but I didn't include enough details to make it as clear as it is in your post. At any rate, doing this allows the user to avoid using different usernames for each account.

Thanks for the extra details.

[simon]

Yes, after years of multi-booting I've found that a shared /home folder is not a good idea, due to the amount of configuration info that gets stored in the hidden (dotted) folders: your alternate systems will sometimes conflict with each other. The solution of having a shared /home/data folder is one I arrived at too, in stages, first shifting my video files onto another drive and symlinking to those...then the same with audio files once they took up too much room...and now I simply mount my data on a different partition and share it among setups, as suggested, leaving the actual /home folder as a folder in the root partition of each system. Incidentally, this is roughly the idea behind "/usr/share" too...keeping system independent files separate from the trickier stuff.

If you take this approach, your other partitions (i.e. the ones without data) can be quite small: I still keep mine below 5GB so I can back them up to DVD if desired; however, this is a careful use of space, and 5GB would not be enough for a "full install" of a bulky modern distro like OpenSUSE (or at least, not if you want any room for big programs like FPS games, etc.). Backups are really my main consideration when devising partitioning schemes: once you have a good stable system installed, you only need to back it up occasionally; whereas you should be backing up data files regularly (though again, this probably applies more to email and word processor data and so on--which you may want to keep on an encrypted partition--than to the bulkier audiovisual data). For this reason it's good to have "system" stuff (/, /usr, /etc, and so on) separate from "user" stuff (/home or /home/data or whatever), so that you're not backing up several Gig of unchanged bytes every time.

As with so many things GNU/Linux, there is no objective "best way" to do things: you will eventually be guided by what's annoying and what works for your particular habits and needs.

[irlandes]

I run around 12GB on each distro. And, then I run a 40GB vfat storage area for all distros. When I install a distro, I open a file browser, split it if it allows that, and put ~ in one, and the storage area in the other, then drag across and link what I want/need for that distro. Things like old radio shows (legal, by the way) and my 1500 books from Gutenberg Project.

The one problem I have with multi-distros is that I use Evolution for my mail, and I keep it all, after bad experiences in losing emails I later could have used.

First, the .evolution files that store your mails, and also your config files, some of them cannot be stored in vfat or on a CD, they have to be compressed and stored, then decompressed later when in place.

I tried putting them in a special small ext3 partition, but a new version of Evolution re-formatted it, eliminating their use on a different distro.

Kalarm, which for me is an absolute must have app, also did that, which really messed me up. So, I keep the alarm and the e-mail on one main distro, until I set up a new main distro.

So, multi distro can have limitations depending totally upon your choices.

[qajaq]

I used openSuSE on one machine for about a year, CentOS for several months, and I've used Kubuntu on a couple other machines for a little over a year -- all of these Linux installations set up to triple-boot with WinXP and Vista (later Win7), but I've never shared multiple Linux installations on one machine simultaneously. I've used different combinations and sizes of partitions for the Linux OSes.

I did find that if I mounted separate partitions for the /usr/local and /home directories, the main (root) partition could be quite small in most cases; however, in using Kubuntu 9.04, it seemed that a lot of the software I downloaded and installed (using apt-get from the command line) ended up on the root partition, which, at 20 GB, quickly became very nearly full.

For an experimental set-up, where you may not be installing a lot of applications in addition to those that come with the package, 20 GB should be fine, but part of your experimentation should be to ascertain exactly where any additional packages get installed, and plan your later partition set-up accordingly.