Help with Ubuntu

Gaming I will leave to ABF, BT and the others, though I believe at least two of the three games you listed work under Cedega. Overclocking, not as likely, is it possible? Yea, but it sure aint easy. There was a thread about underclocking an Intel CPU posted a little ways back, the process is even what I would give a second thought to before doing myself. In as far as resizing partitions, you certainly can, in fact I reccomend it, however defraging is always a good idea as resizing partitions in any program is unfortunatly not an exact science and can result in data loss. As such if you can make sure the partition is as clean as you can get it before you resize. Seablade

You first question is actually a threefor;

Gameplaying in Linux vs. Windows
Not nearly as many native Linux games as Windows. Check out someplaces like;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ed_Linux_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...al_Linux_games
http://www.tuxgames.com/

which can help you with what runs natively under Linux. There's also a number of options for running Windows games under Linux via emulators. My opinion is if you seriously consider that, you should just run the games under Windows. (Especially when you take the other two parts of your question into consideration)

Overclocking a video GPU under Linux
Overclocking an nVidia card is helped out by the following tool;

http://www.linuxhardware.org/nvclock/

and there's even a review of using it at;

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=160&num=1

So with nVidia GPUs it's not so bad under Linux. But then again you didn't say what kind of video hardware you have. If you have something other than nVidia, then I'm not sure how you would overclock it under Linux.

Undervolting a CPU under Linux.
Like so many things in Linux, it's not as easy as it is in the Windows world. Check out;

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=97043

and;

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Undervolt_a_Pentium_M_CPU

You should see what I mean.


I wouldn't dream of making my decision to do this, based upon game playing, overclocking video GPUs, and undervolting CPU choices alone. As you can see, you have more game choices, and easy utilities to do the things you want to do under Windows, so based on that, Linux isn't really a good choice for you.

But for so many other things, Linux is the right OS choice.


First off, you're swap is too big (probably). It doesn't need to be double your memory beyond 1gb of swap (if that's indeed the rule of thumb that you used). Your first question here seems to be if you can resize your Linux partitions. The answer is that it depends on your file system and what tools you have installed. There are Linux partition managers like Parted;

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

which can do these kinds of things. My advice is, if you are at the beginning of using your installation. Backup your data, and then delete your installation and start fresh. Create the partitions you want to create, and then install everything again.

The second question here is, if you did resize your root and swap partitions, and created a home partition, you are correct in that you would be separating your os and apps from your data. It's a pretty good thing to do, although I don't find myself reinstalling my OS under Linux, so I have one root partition. (And of course one swap partition) If you have multiple partitions you may eventually come across the problem where you have one partition running out of space, and the other with excess space, and no way to move freespace from one partition to another without resizing them. That's why I went back to one partition (and because I use a file system that Parted can't resize, xfs).

Almost all Linux distros, like Ubuntu, allow you to continually update your install withouth reinstalling your OS, so ideally once you're set, you shouldn't be reinstalling your OS much, (unless you like that kind of stuff..).

Good Luck..

Since you can access everything on your Windows partition through Linux, you can use your Windows data drive (you have a separate data drive for Windows right?) in Linux as well -- thus eliminating the need for a separate /home partition in Linux. Having Windows and Linux dual bootable will also help you diagnose hardware/software problems.

One other thing you might want to do is break out the /boot directory to a separate partition. The /boot partition contains the kernel code that Linux loads on boot. You can specify through /etc/fstab that the partition not be auto mounted, this I do for security reasons. I find 128MB is big enough for three different kernels plus boot screen images, so you won't be wasting much space by breaking /boot out into a separate partition.