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What's an optimal distribution of partitions for Linux(mint16)?

I know almost any Linux user will say that it's a matter of opinion but I'm new to Linux and also fairly new to file systems. I'm just trying out Linux.

My idea was to give 8GB to LinuxOS, 8GB to swap, 256MB to boot, and 20GB to /home. All ext4 FS, except /home.

My PC is dual-booted with Win8, so I'd like to have a /home which is shared with Windows so I can access that drive (movies,documents etc.) from both OSes. The thing is that the you can't have a file system for /home that is supported by both OSes, am I right? I thought FAT32 was, but it seems it isn't, unfortunately.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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  • Instead of sharing /home, an option is to have another common partition that both OSs can access. This could be /share for example on Linux, and be NTFS. Linux has good NTFS support these days, and Windows isn't bad at it either. This approach is only suitable for single user systems.
    – Paul
    Mar 12, 2014 at 23:49

2 Answers 2

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If you are new to this, keep it simple!

You need a swap partition but it will never need to be larger than your memory or 2GB whichever is smaller.

You need a root (/) big enough to hold Linux and any installed applications plus system settings.

You should use a /home to hold all user data. The advantage is that you can rebuild without destroying personal data. Personally, I don't do this as I nearly always want to rebuild user profiles cleanly when reinstalling (which wont happen if you retain the /home folders) so I keep a number of key folders (e.g. Photos, Documents, User Scripts, Videos, etc.) on a separate partition and use soft links to insert the folders to any new install - so I only have a root (/) and a swp partition. I use a script to rebuild the links so it is easy. I also link back in key files that do remain the same such as the bash profile script.

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Your /boot probably needs to be bigger than 256MB. I'm a zealot about removing old kernels and the boot partition of the server I'm staring at is currently 236 MB. One old extra kernel and you'll be having disk space &/or inode issues that you won't be prepared to deal with. If you're going to put it on a separate partition, give yourself a GB otherwise just let it live inside /

8GB for swap is overkill. 1-2GB is plenty.

8GB for the OS partition probably isn't big enough, particularly if you plan to use a desktop GUI like Gnome. Since you're using a really basic partition scheme, I'd recommend bumping / up to 20GB.

You will also need about 2GB for /tmp

You don't need to give yourself a big /home if you share the home directory on the Windows partition but I would give yourself something. My advice is to keep a short cut to your Windows home inside your personal home directory. Remote mounting home directories can be problematic if Linux fails to read the Windows folder for some reason. It may decide not to boot if the home partition can't be mounted.

HTH. If you have more questions, just ask. Oh,yea... Welcome to the dark side... We have cookies...

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