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Wanting to dual boot XP and Ubuntu - Basic questions

post #1 of 12
10/30/06 at 7:11pm
Thread Starter 
I feel quite stupid for asking some of these questions, but here goes...

Well first of all, I'm really interested in trying Ubuntu out. I've wanted to try Linux for a while, and tomorrow my new laptop should arrive so I figured this would be a really good opportunity to finally do it. It will come with XP Home edition installed, I would like to dual boot XP and Ubuntu.
I've been reading through forums and trying to find guides etc for the past two days, I imagine the questions I have are pretty common, yet I still can't seem to find an answer to them, it seems the more I read, the more questions I have and the more confusing everything becomes.

I understand I have to partition my hard drive, I've been told that it would be best to create a new partition without formatting as the laptop should come with just a clean install of XP. I don't really understand how many partitions I need to dual boot XP and Ubuntu, or how I determine how much space I should allocate to each (the laptop will have a single 80gb HD)?

If anyone could point me in the direction of a guide which explains what I need to do from the *very* beginning, or one that explains partitioning in a lot of detail, I'd be extremely grateful. I have some more questions, but I need to get this cleared up before I ask those!

Thanks.
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post #2 of 12
10/30/06 at 7:19pm
the ubuntu installer uses gparted as a partitioning tool, likewise you can use partition magic ahead of time to prep the drive. my personal recommendation is to boot the livecd, pop open gparted, delete everything and create a new layout on the hdd, then install windows, and then linux (order is important since linux will be installing grub bootloader). or you can just resize your ntfs (make sure to defrag first) and create a new partition on the free space.

you'll need at least 3 partitions, 4 would be greatly recommended though.

here are 2 recommended options for you:
option 1:
/dev/hda1 --- 60gb -- ntfs -- WinXP
/dev/hda2 -- 2gb --- swap --- swap
/dev/hda3 --- 18gb --- reiserfs --- /

option 2:
/dev/hda1 --- 60gb -- ntfs -- WinXP
/dev/hda2 -- 2gb --- swap --- swap
/dev/hda3 --- 8gb --- reiserfs --- /
/dev/hda4 --- 10gb -- ext3 ---- /home

you can go even crazier and give /var and /boot its own partitions, but for a beginner user like yourself thats overkill.

RECAP:
1 -- you'll need at least 3 partitions (option 1) but 4 are recommended (option 2)
2 -- i personally suggest clearing the hdd and starting fresh, but you can resize using gparted or partition magic
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post #3 of 12
10/30/06 at 8:08pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks very much.

I have one more question. I have around 25 GB of music which I'll probably want to transfer to the laptop, which partition would I keep all the files I might want to access regardless of which OS I'm running on?
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post #4 of 12
10/30/06 at 8:34pm
in that case here is a new layout for ya:

/dev/hda1 --- 30gb --- ntfs -- WinXP
/dev/hda2 --- 2gb --- swap --- swap
/dev/hda3 --- 30gb --- fat32 or ext3 --- /dev/hda3 (just mounted as storage space)
/dev/hda4 --- 18gb --- reiserfs --- Linux

so instead of having a separate /home partition , you'll have that shared 30gig partition for all your files to be stores which makes your /home folder much smaller so that it can easily go on the /(root) w/o any issues.

Make that shared space Fat32 or ext3, I'd recommend ext3 but either one works. If you're going the fat32 route, make sure to format that partition in linux since the XP fat formater is crappy. If you're going the ext3 route, you'll need to install approriate drivers in XP to support reading ext3 partitions.
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post #5 of 12
10/30/06 at 9:21pm
Thread Starter 
Okay, this makes a lot more sense now. Thank you so much.
I'm starting to regret not going for the 100gig hard drive, I didn't realize how much stuff I was planning to put on this laptop. I'll have to see how this goes tomorrow. Thanks again.
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post #6 of 12
1/10/07 at 8:01pm
Would appreciate a quick explanation (or pointer to one) of reiserfs vs ext3. What advantage does each have (and why did you suggest using both at onece on different partitions?)
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post #7 of 12
1/12/07 at 8:36pm
Well my guess would be ABF has a preference for ReiserFS for whatever reason. Which is best depends on your work, but as I have said in the past, for 90+ percent of the people out there they will never notice a difference between the two for most tasks in the desktop Linux world.

Also my guess is that he recommended ext for the reason of it is easy to find drivers for it to allow Windows to access it. I believe it probably isn't difficult to find drivers for reiserFS either as I believe both are open source, though I have never looked for reiser myself. Personally I recommend ext3 for most people until you get into specialized applications, either enterprise level, specialized for audio/video, or Myth Myth out of those is the most common that an average user would run across and in that case I believe it is XFS? that gets recommended for use on whatever partition holds the recordings due to its fast deletion times. Past that, stick with ext in most cases and you won't go wrong.

Seablade
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post #8 of 12
1/22/07 at 4:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by seablade
Well my guess would be ABF has a preference for ReiserFS for whatever reason. Which is best depends on your work, but as I have said in the past, for 90+ percent of the people out there they will never notice a difference between the two for most tasks in the desktop Linux world.

Also my guess is that he recommended ext for the reason of it is easy to find drivers for it to allow Windows to access it. I believe it probably isn't difficult to find drivers for reiserFS either as I believe both are open source, though I have never looked for reiser myself. Personally I recommend ext3 for most people until you get into specialized applications, either enterprise level, specialized for audio/video, or Myth Myth out of those is the most common that an average user would run across and in that case I believe it is XFS? that gets recommended for use on whatever partition holds the recordings due to its fast deletion times. Past that, stick with ext in most cases and you won't go wrong.

Seablade

I agree for the most part, however I'll throw in my .02 cents saying that I've seen significant differences in speed when doing mass audio editing/conversion/etc between ext3 and reiser or xfs. At this point, I've started using exclusively reiserfs, because it's a good compromise between ext3 and xfs. Xfs is the fastest for audio conversions, while ext3 is the slowest. However xfs is less stable... reiserfs sits right in the middle.

-olly
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post #9 of 12
1/22/07 at 4:47pm
Quote:
Xfs is the fastest for audio conversions, while ext3 is the slowest. However xfs is less stable... reiserfs sits right in the middle.
Yep I was about to mention XFS was probably going to be the fastest for those Haven't heard of any problems with stability in it though, that is interesting. There are certain tasks where one FS will outshine another, that is why in enterprise installs you will find certain FSs for storage in different applications, or for dedicated use installs you will find a preference for one FS over another. However for a general purpose install, that typically levels the playing field VERY fast. The average person won't be doing enough of one task vs another to be able to take advantage of it really, and while for example it may be super fast in reencoding large media files, it might also be very slow in accessing multiple small files, like documents you are trying to search through to find your research paper you wrote 5 years back Evens things out, which is why ext tends to be a nice safe choice for about anyone, it does about average on most tasks I believe. Seablade
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post #10 of 12
1/22/07 at 4:59pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by seablade
Yep I was about to mention XFS was probably going to be the fastest for those Haven't heard of any problems with stability in it though, that is interesting.

The instability is largely apocryphal, I'll admit... however, I've personally noticed it when doing large conversions from .wav to .ogg... i'm talking 1500 .wav files mass converted to .ogg... sometimes xfs will crap out, and you'll have to restart where it left off. This was on a buddy's machine running Debian, and he and I spent a few hours trying to find any other source of the problem... the final culprit, as best we could tell, was xfs.

Quote:
There are certain tasks where one FS will outshine another, that is why in enterprise installs you will find certain FSs for storage in different applications, or for dedicated use installs you will find a preference for one FS over another.

However for a general purpose install, that typically levels the playing field VERY fast. The average person won't be doing enough of one task vs another to be able to take advantage of it really, and while for example it may be super fast in reencoding large media files, it might also be very slow in accessing multiple small files, like documents you are trying to search through to find your research paper you wrote 5 years back Evens things out, which is why ext tends to be a nice safe choice for about anyone, it does about average on most tasks I believe.

Seablade

I definitely do agree, and for example just did an ext3 install on my mom's laptop, as she's just getting into learning about Linux, and is a pretty standard user anyway. For straight storage, ext3 is where it's at (and is what my external HDD is formatted as).

-olly
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post #11 of 12
1/22/07 at 7:07pm
Quote:
The instability is largely apocryphal, I'll admit... however, I've personally noticed it when doing large conversions from .wav to .ogg... i'm talking 1500 .wav files mass converted to .ogg... sometimes xfs will crap out, and you'll have to restart where it left off. This was on a buddy's machine running Debian, and he and I spent a few hours trying to find any other source of the problem... the final culprit, as best we could tell, was xfs.
Usually if the FS craps out, you WILL know it. You will have corrupted files typically at least(And very possibly much worse results), so starting where you left off actually leads me to believe it was not the FS. Though anything is possible, it may just be the particular interaction with the software you were using didn't get along with the FS, I am not sure, generally that shouldn't be a problem though. Seablade
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post #12 of 12
1/22/07 at 7:45pm
i use reiserfs (3) as much as possible, sometimes i do fall back on ext3 though. not that the performance difference is that huge for daily tasks, hey...any gain in performance is good gain. never had any stability issues with raiser either...
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