Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

[kortsen]

Kubuntu has been my primary boot for a month. I am ready to take Windoze 2000 off my laptop and turn the whole drive over to Gutsy. I have my Gparted CD in the drive and I just want to know how best to do what I want to do. I have a 20 gig drive partitioned as follows:

/dev/sda1 NTFS 7.9Gb
/dev/sda2 EXT3 10.2Gb
/dev/sda3 swap 492Mb

Once I remove the NTFS partition there will be lots of room to expand my EXT3 partition and my swap partition.

1) What is a good size for the swap file on a 1gHz Pentium III with 256 meg of ram?

1a) Does Gparted Live CD mount the swap partition? If so, how do I resize/delete/create a swap file?
(I ask cuz a lot of Live CDs detect and mount a swap file if it's there)

2) Will my system go pants if the EXT3 partition suddenly becomes /dev/sda1?

2a) Can I put the swap file ahead of the EXT3 partition? This would make the swap partition sda1 and leave the EXT3 partition as sda2.

[dibl]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

Glad you asked!

6GB will do nicely for Kubuntu "/", you could go down to 5GB if you promise to keep an eye on it and do your

sudo apt-get autoclean

regularly.

If you don't need to "hibernate", then 0.5GB is sufficient for swap.

The rest of it can be a partition for "/home".

The partitions don't care where they are on the drive. I like to put "/" first, swap second, and "/home" third, but I don't believe it actually matters at all.

[Qqmike]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

If a partition is mounted, or if you find it that way while in GParted, you can unmount it right there in GParted and then go to work on that partition. I forget how without looking, but when you are in GParted it will be obvious how. (e.g., highlight that partition and right-click, or at the top menu, Partition > there somewhere).

If you have an existing Kubuntu on a hard drive, and if you mess with the partitions or disks, when finished, get into Kubuntu and re-check the filesystem table, /etc/fstab, to make everything accurate; e.g., generate new UUIDs if necessary, and so on.

[kortsen]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

If you don't need to "hibernate", then 0.5GB is sufficient for swap.

"Hibernate" is on my to-do list.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3088200.0

How much swap space should I have with Hibernate?

[Snowhog]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

The basic 'standard' when establishing SWAP is 2 to 2.5 times your RAM.

[myxal]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

I wouldn't go with these "multiples of system RAM" capacities for swap... More likely, make an estimate of maximum memory usage you will likely make - this is heavily dependent on what program you run (how many tabs in Firefox, etc..), whether you (need to) run them all together or you can quit some high-usage app if you run out of memory.
For example, my memory footprint (both in XP and Linux is below 800 MiB at most occasions, but if I wanted to run Eclipse development environment with visual editor, that alone consumes another 300-500 MiB, so to make sure that the memory is there when I need it, total virtual memory capacity (swap + physical) should be at least 1.5GiB. When I was partitioning my drive, I had only 512 MiBs, so I made a 1 GiB swap file. Now I have 1 GiB of memory and the swap file is hardly used, maybe if I run virtual machine with XP...

In the end, I say: Make a swap file so big that your total memory is 1-2GiB. But like I said, it depends what you intend to run.

[dibl]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

Most of the advice that you find on the Internet, regarding setting the swap partition size, reflects the traditional RAM limitations of legacy personal computer designs, when RAM was terribly expensive and capacity-limited compared to hard drive space. Mostly, "they" say 1.5X RAM.

But clearly on recent systems with a lot of RAM, like mine, that is bogus advice. I have 4GB of RAM installed, and the most intensive multi-tasking I've ever done has never pushed swap utilization over about 350MB. So my 0.5GB swap partition is mostly wasted space.

I read advice recently, that I can't put my finger on today, that said if your laptop has 1GB of RAM and you want it to hibernate, then you should set swap to 1.2GB. Basically it needs to save an "image" of the live session, and still have space for a few new processes needed to revive itself, so that's kind of a worst-case scenario for swap utilization.

[kortsen]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

I am quite happy with the way my system is running now, with 2 exceptions; Caturday threads on Fark (which sucked up the memory on Windows too) and my favourite poker client running under Wine (which will never be as fast as running it in native Windows).

How can I find out what my current swap utilization is?

[dibl]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

KMenu>System>Kinfocenter, and click on "Memory". You can just watch it while you do your normal work -- it is a dynamic display.

Are Windows programs in Wine as fast as they are in VMWare Player? I've got a hoggy MS Visual FoxPro app that I run in Win XP on a VMWare Player machine, and I measured it at 95% as fast as in native Win XP. It wouldn't work in Wine. Just a thought.

[myxal]

Re: Time to nuke the Billyware. Partitioning advice wanted.

I'm not sure winXP AND Linux will do well with merely 256 MB of RAM. Looks like an excercise in swapping.

OTOH, I have win2k virtual with 100 MiB allocated on a Pentium III machine with 320 MiB RAM and that runs fine .

Also KSysGuard gives some numbers for swap usage in its bottom bar