You can use any partition editor that you may be familiar with to do this. The one in the Ubuntu installer works well if you understand a few basics. However while you are doing a custom installation then I would suggest making a few changes.
I would put Ubuntu on two partitions, one for root and one for home plus your swap plus your downloads partition. That makes four partitions in all. If you are downloading multimedia and ripping then you will need a larger root. Typically users choose 8 GBs. I have several desktop environments and a lot of applications installed and it comes to about 10 GBs of used space. However you want to leave space for temp files. They can be quite large. 20 GBs should be loads for heavy users and 8 for lighter users. Home can be any size you choose. Depending on how you use it you can get away with a relatively small one. Mine is 200 GBs because I have lots of photographs and store things centrally. I back them up to an external drive. If you want a small one then you may have to move things to the Downloads partition or store them offline at a regular interval. If you choose to small a home or root partition then you may find things become unstable or even make your system freeze and not boot. That is not fun to sort out. Err on the side of caution and choose bigger over smaller. Swap should be no larger than twice your RAM or it will actually slow you down. I use the same as my RAM since I have lots to begin with. Why use a separate home and root partition? It makes re-installing a breeze. You keep your home and all its fiels and settings when you re-install and will not use them provided you NEVER choose to format it and keep the same partition and user name. That means a custom installation every time, but it is a piece of cake once you get a handle on it. Roy Using Kubuntu 12.10, 64-bit Location: Canada On 6 January 2013 12:54, Matthew Dey <[email protected]> wrote: > On 01/05/2013 07:41 PM, gcopper wrote: >> >> I have a laptop withour windows, hd 1.5 TB 64 bit >> >> Want to install Ubuntu 12.10 and the rest of 1.5 TB for different >> downloads. >> >> What are the steps to be successful? >> >> Best Regards >> gcopper >> >> > During the installation phase you'll come to a part that asks you if you > want to use the entire drive/along side something/something else. > > Choose something else. The other words that might be seen are stuff like > custom settings or expert which are equivalent. > > The purpose is to partition (thats the key vocabulary word) the hard drive. > To install an operating system like linux generally you'll want to allocate > 40GB for your / partition and mount your / partition (also known as root > partition) on that 40GB allocation. This / partition contains all your > installed apps and system software so 40GB should be far more than enough > for most folks. I don't recommend less than 15GB unless you know what > you're doing (some apps like games can get big). Then to make things easy > to install other linux os's along side you'll want to make another partition > for your personal data called the /home partition and mount it accordingly. > The /home partition should be large to accommodate all your personal data > like photos, videos, documents, music, and etc. I recommend with a huge > drive like that to allocate at the very least 500GB to /home. Finally > you'll want to create a smallish /swap partition that is slightly larger > than the size of your total ram(a side note: swap is used for hibernation > where the contents of ram are dumped to the hard drive so the computer can > recover from your last place if you choose to hibernate your computer rather > than shut it down). The remainder of space on your drive should be left > unallocated. > > Here are the main points again. > > / = 40GB for applications+software > /home >= 500GB for personal data > /swap >= the size of your ram > > and the rest to be left unallocated so that they can be used for later use. > > I would highly recommend looking into articles online describing multiboot > as there is quite a lot to learn that can be very helpful. Read into GRUB > (GRand Unified Bootloader) so you can learn about how to do stuff like chain > loading and adding custom entries. Chainloading will be a good friend to you > as you can use your MBR (Master Boot Record) to load other installs from > their grubs installed to their partitions superblock which means you won't > need to update your Ubuntu's grub every single time you get a kernel update > in one of your installs. I would learn about ubuntu a bit before going > distro hopping as learning the common tools and utilities can help make > things easier when you try less user friendly distributions. > > I hope this helps with a very broad topic with lots to learn. > > Regards, > > -Matt > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users > Group. > To post a message, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] > For more options, visit our group at > http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup > References can be found at: http://goo.gl/anqri > Please remember to abide by our list rules (http://tinyurl.com/LUG-Rules or > http://cdn.fsdev.net/List-Rules.pdf) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup References can be found at: http://goo.gl/anqri Please remember to abide by our list rules (http://tinyurl.com/LUG-Rules or http://cdn.fsdev.net/List-Rules.pdf)
