Hard disk partitioning

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

Hi everyone,
I've been using Ubuntu for last 4 years, Now I want to switch to Gentoo (to learn more).
In last 4 years I've realized, I need separate home partition to port easily.

So this question is bit opinion based:
I received 750GB hybrid HDD for my laptop yesterday

I was thinking 150GB for system and 600GB for home.
I wanted community opinion, (My Ubuntu system space never exceeded more than 30GB so I'm assuming 150GB will be plenty)
but then again I never used Gentoo before.

Thanks

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 4:42 am Post subject:

30GB is a fairly conservative figure for everything minus home.
you can get by with significantly less (i have full installs with just 16GB - building bigger packages gets sporty, but still manageable - and people do get by with much less in certain setups)

your 150GB for the system partition will be more than sufficient. way overkill in fact, but breathing room is nice.

If you want to give yourself space to be a complete pack rat with installing all kinds of crap, and never cleaning up old source tarballs, 50GB seems like a nice round number that should do the job, with plenty of room left over.
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BillWho · Veteran Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 1600 Location: US

wisemonkey,

Welcome to gentoo - the fun has just begun

IMHO 150Gig would be a big waste of disk space. 16Gig for this lappy w/47% used.
_________________
Good luck :wink:

Since installing gentoo, my life has become one long emerge

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

BillWho · Veteran Joined: 03 Mar 2012 Posts: 1600 Location: US

wisemonkey,

I use mint/debian (lmde) live dvd for the installation. Although there is an installation cd for gentoo, it's not really necessary.

All you need is a terminal and internet connection to dl the stage3 and portage tarballs.

Also, you can use gparted for partitioning and formatting your disk :wink:

_________________
Good luck :wink:

Since installing gentoo, my life has become one long emerge

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

Thanks guys,
I'll update you from gentoo hopefully

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 7:56 am Post subject:

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I use 128MB for /boot, and 16GB for /, /usr/portage, /var, and /home with several other very large
directories containing eg: music and backup archives which are mounted on /home. I also have a small
entirely separate partition containing a second install which boots to a shell and which I use for maintenance.

That's proved a pretty flexible and useful setup over the years, particularly the separate /boot.
My laptops get a bit neurotic if you mess with their master boot record, so I boot through the
inevitable Windows to the grub partition, and once that has been set up I never have to touch Grub
(Classic) again apart from editing grub.conf.

The only partition I've ever had get corrupted enough to need reformatting (ext3/4) is /var,
and that was a while back.

Will

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

lost+found · Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 8:08 am Post subject:

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 9:33 am Post subject:

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

lost+found · Posted: Mon Mar 18, 2013 9:39 am Post subject:

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

Hey everyone thanks a lot for all your inputs.
This morning I got my system running with Gentoo

I ended up with following configuration (don't yell at me for inefficient config

this laptop is completely testing place before putting stuff on servers / computers):
/boot - 42GB sda1
swap - 8GB sda2
/ - 50GB sda5
/usr - 50GB sda6
/opt - 50GB sda7 (I'm not planning to run any game server, but I'll test few)
/var - 50GB sda8 (again not planing to run mail server but I test kolab and such on this laptop before server)
/home - remaining sda9 (450GB, I was assuming 500GB but I'll look into size later)

It was fun going through and knowing my system some more to install gentoo. Though I didn't test wireless, sound, video yet

Anyways I'm planning to follow https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-953872.html and similar to get setup with x environment (I've selected profile as gnome so I'm assuming its already there)
If you have any other suggestions please share.

Thanks

lost+found · Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 9:42 am Post subject:

Best way is picking all official howto's you need from:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml

and: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Intel_Microcode
for the latest firmware fixes for the core2duo

KLarsen · n00b Joined: 30 Dec 2005 Posts: 61 Location: Spain

42GB for /boot is waayyy too much, you really don't need more than 30-50MB. My boot partition is only 32MB and I've never had a problem with space.

Apart from that, my partition setup looks like this:
/ 15GB (only using about 50% of the space, for a desktop system with KDE).
swap 1GB though I never use it. How much RAM does you laptop have? 8GB swap seems a lot.
/var 8GB
/usr/portage 13GB for all those distfiles
/var/tmp and /tmp on TMPFS as I'm running root on an SSD.

Of course, it has taken me a few years to get to this partition layout, and it works for me with the programs I'm running. So just keep experimenting and you'll arrive at a good layout.

lost+found · Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2013 11:32 am Post subject:

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

30-50MB is way too small for /boot. The time when a Linux kernel fit on a 1.44M floppy disk are long over. Depending on the complexity of your Initramfs you may go up to 10M for a single kernel these days; if you want to keep a dozen old ones around just in case, you're already way past the 30-50MB for kernels alone, not counting grub, possibly themes, memtest, and all the other stuff that goes into a comfortable /boot. So go for at least 256M or something to be comfortable.

I actually upped that to 1G because hey, room to spare on my 16G USB stick despite Live CDs. (2G FreeDOS - also accessible from windows, 1G /boot, 10G for LiveCD ISOs, and the remaining 2G a Linux partition for any other temporary/mobile file storage needs that may come up, eg. when editing something I want to keep in one of the live systems).

@lost+found: great avatar

miss this guy

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

Thanks KLarsen, lost+found and frostschutz

As I said I'm pretty sure I didn't do partitioning very efficiently, but I'll take my time maybe few years to figure out what works for me.
But I like to get opinions, glad to know I can put liveCD in boot and directly use it that way (though I'm yet to figure out how)

I'm already following http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/list.xml to get xorg and gnome working.

I also look for what worked for others (sometimes can be very helpful

)

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45

First of all I feel at this point I should start new thread but as you will see there exist exactly same thread (I want to try to resolve before going back to compiling kernel)

I followed guides to install (enable) proper devices and X
Then installed gnome

However starting x gives me an error "No devices detected"

I feel like I'm facing something similar to https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-889962-highlight-number+created+screens+match+number+detected+devices.html

I do see that number of created screen don't match number of detected devices. in my case as well.

That one is resolved by compiling kernel again, I wanted to know if I should try other things before going back to installation.

Thanks

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

if you look in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc you'll find a reference at the end of the file to a "fallback"
windowing setup using twm, xterm and xclock. I usually emerge those packages for just
that reason, to test X before trying to start a heavyweight windowing system like Gnome.
It might be worth trying that, to see if it gives you a clearer error message.

Will

wisemonkey · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2013 Posts: 45