About to switch, need partitioning help!

A

astyler

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So I'm about to switch from Windows to Ubuntu and I had a few questions.

I plan to use it for the following uses:
General desktop -- internet, gmail, etc...
Folding @ Home
TF2 in Wine
Myth backend

I don't quite understand the desktop environments, but I plan to use GNOME instead of KDE because I've used APT a little bit.

I was looking at the customized desktops and there's some things I wanted but don't know how to get. I want the 4 switchable desktops (even clicking in the bottom right is fine, I don't need the "cube"). Also I want the mac-like action bar with the applications, do i need KDE or Xfce or fluxbox for this?

Last question, I have 640GB of drive space, how should I do my partitions?

I understand mounting swap/ for about 2-3GB or so.
Where will TF2 and Wine or other windows games go? On / or home/?
How much space should I mount for home/?
Do I need a boot/ mount?
Finally, I want to mount var/lib/ as most of my space for recordings.

swap/ - 3GB
/ - 15GB
home/ - ?
var/lib/ - rest

Thanks for any and all help.
 
Also, I have a bunch of media files on a NTFS drive I want to copy over. Can I hook up this drive and copy it over to my /var/lib/ partition (probably XFS)?
 
astyler said:
So I'm about to switch from Windows to Ubuntu and I had a few questions.

I plan to use it for the following uses:
General desktop -- internet, gmail, etc...
Folding @ Home
TF2 in Wine
Myth backend

I don't quite understand the desktop environments, but I plan to use GNOME instead of KDE because I've used APT a little bit.

I was looking at the customized desktops and there's some things I wanted but don't know how to get. I want the 4 switchable desktops (even clicking in the bottom right is fine, I don't need the "cube"). Also I want the mac-like action bar with the applications, do i need KDE or Xfce or fluxbox for this?
Click to expand...

I've installed Kubuntu on a desktop (single boot, separate from windows). It comes with KDE 3.5. All distros come with the multi-desktop function, at least the ones i tested (kubuntu, ubuntu, Mandriva...i think even suse. Ubuntu by default has 2, the rest have 4.

KDE 4.0 I think would give you that mac app launch - i'm not totally sure.

When you install ubuntu it will take a portion of the drive you select and partition it. It chooses a size but you can make it much bigger. It is unable to see any NTFS-formatted drive. I have not figured out yet how to dual boot and have a common drive where linux and windows cna see this drive.
 
chrispycrunch said:
When you install ubuntu it will take a portion of the drive you select and partition it. It chooses a size but you can make it much bigger. It is unable to see any NTFS-formatted drive. I have not figured out yet how to dual boot and have a common drive where linux and windows cna see this drive.
Click to expand...
Actually, I believe Ubuntu 7.10 comes with out-of-the-box NTFS support. I've got an NTFS-formatted 400GB drive in one of my Ubuntu boxes, and it can read and write to it just fine. I didn't even have to do anything to make it work. It just got detected and mounted automatically.
 
Personally, I'd say forget about the partitioning - unless you have very specific requirements, just let Ubuntu handle partitioning (this usually means xGB for swap, and the rest in its own partition). If you don't know your system inside out, partitioning it yourself will just end up with one of the partitions running out of space when you least expect it.

If you're talking about the OS X dock, then you'll probably want Avant Window Navigator. It requires a compositing window manager (and, annoyingly, doesn't work with any current release of XFCE right now) such as Compiz or Beryl. I run it with Gnome, and it's absolutely spot on. It's actually far more functional than the OS X bar, due to the number of plugins available. Nod if you want instructions on installing it - it's really easy, but I don't have the repositories to hand right now.

There are others, such as KSmoothDock (parabolic zoom like OS X, but I just couldn't get it working smoothly in GNOME and it's nowhere near as configurable/extensible as AWN) and Kiba-Dock (which just seems like a toy dock at the moment, in comparison with AWN). I've tried them all, and AWN just has everything except parabolic zoom, which is a feature I can live without in the face of everything else it offers.

Note that you don't need to use the cube with Compiz Fusion - it used to impress me, but I've found that using the slideable Desktop Wall feature is much more friendly and seamless.
 
It's fairly easy -

/ (root) - 10GB (more than enough)
/home - 25GB
/data - rest (use this for storage, or if you want to use /home for storage you can skip this data partition, i just find it handier this way)
swap - 256MB should be enough.
 
Ubuntu's installer will give you a huge swap as default, you should modify that to make it somewhat reasonable. If you have a lot of ram you really don't need one.
 
I was reading through the documentation here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall and I have a question about the part where you select which disk to install to. Does that disk need to be completely empty of any Windows data? I assume that in order for Ubuntu to "resize" a partitition it will delete all the data from it?

I'm mainly just wondering if it's possible to dual boot WinXP and Ubuntu on a single harddrive. I wanted to try out Ubuntu on my Dell XPS M1710 laptop and I only have one drive to use for this. I found this guide: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/05/08/dual-boot-laptop.html and I was about to go in head-first. I just wanted to know if other people have successfully dual-booted WinXP and Ubuntu on their laptops.
 
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