setting up new MX installation--how to do 3 partitions?

[Seeker]

Hi all: I have been running MX 19.3 for about a year. V happy with it. However, when I first set up MX I chickened out re deviating from the default set up (root and home on same partition). Also, I had wanted a separate data partition. I just got confused when I tried to use the partitioning tool upon set up. So I just did a data folder under home and I just back that up using Lucky Backup. How should I do the partitioning if I need to set up MX again, from scratch?

[rob.chaffe]

First google hit:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/35676/h ... -linux-pc/
Bet there's a few more. It's up to you, so best to read up on it.

Rob

[entropyfoe]

Back up all your data.

Use gparted from the live USB and delete all the old partitions.
I then create 4, the maximum primary partitions.

I do a / of about 15-25GB (depending how big is your disk?)
Then a big swap (yea I know....) a few hundred MB bigger than the RAM size.
Third a /home partition, Usually 100GB or so. I really don't use it much for data, I have a separate drive (1TB SSD) for all my data, so it is independent of all OS problems or changes.
Last a partition that takes the rest of the space on the disk. You could use this for data. I use it as an experimental partition for trying the new AntiX or a MX beta or new respin that looks interesting. That install has grub to root.

Those are the four partitions to create on the OS drive. Format all to ext4, except swap which is linux swap. Mark that first / partition a bootable, and then go install.

This is my take on things, ususally on a 256GB boot SSD (NVMe) you will hear many other viable methods.

[m_pav]

20GB for / unless you plan to use our Snapshot tool, then make it 30.
all the rest for /home, less 4GB for swap.

Having a swap larger than 4GB is rarely needed, so if you have for example, a PC, whether it be a Desktop or a Laptop with 32GB RAM, then you'd have to be a complete idiot to provision the same in swap, but if you had a server with multiple drives in a software RAID configuration that was to be hammered non-stop for years at a time in a very busy network, then and only then does it make sense to provision as much swap as you have RAM and even then, I'd be inclined to put swap on a dedicated industrial class SSD so as to reduce the hard bottleneck usually encountered when Swap is being actively and aggressively used.

If a machine I'm working on has only 2GB RAM, then I might at a pinch provide it with up to 6GB for swap to facilitate web browsing with multiple tabs open simultaneously, but for any machine with 4GB or more RAM, I usually provision no more than 4GB for swap. The rare instance where I'd give more SWAP is for heavy Desktop users who hibernate often, but for regular users, I've never seen a machine choke with "only" 4GB Swap.

Below is the partition table on my Lenovo T560 Daily Drivers 2TB SSD. The first 4 partitions are the mess that is Windows, hardly, if ever used and the last 3 are MX Linux

Code: Select all

Disk /dev/sda: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: Samsung SSD 860 
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 9539E5A9-AA58-4796-861B-AEA3C34DC2AA

Device          Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1          34     262177     262144  128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda2      264192     796671     532480  260M EFI System
/dev/sda3      796672  671885311  671088640  320G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda4  3904980992 3907028991    2048000 1000M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda5   671885312  713828351   41943040   20G Linux root (x86)
/dev/sda6   713828352 3896633343 3182804992  1.5T Linux root (x86)
/dev/sda7  3896633344 3904980991    8347648    4G Linux root (x86)