Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
A quick update, I haven't had the system freeze with a blank screen again since I set up the swap file, even though I've been leaving it unattended for a few hours at a time. The plural of anecdote is not data, but this does seem to support my contention that Trisquel is able to hibernate to and resume from a swap file (maybe only on SSDs?). Magic banana: > If you find out the rationale for the default [partition scheme in Trisquel installer], please tell it here. Willdo, although anyone from the Trisquel dev team could share this with us if they have time.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Good to know. But what about the fact that the default partitioning scheme did not include a swap partition when I installed both Trisquel 8 and PureOS 8 on the internal SSD of Vision (my 64-bit system)?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Magic banana" > A swap *file* does not support hibernation: a swap *partition* is needed. I believe this is incorrect, for two reasons. One, when I allowed both Trisquel 8 and PureOS 8.0 to partition automatically during install, neither of them set up a swap partition. It seems unlikely to me that the default configuration would be one that results in the system crashing every time it tries to hibernate. Also, see: https://wiki.debian.org/Hibernation/Hibernate_Without_Swap_Partition
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
That seems to have worked for Bishop. I haven't left it alone long enough to suspend or hibernate yet. But where it used to say "Swap not available" in Mate System Monitor, it now shows 2GB of available swap space, with a few hundred KB used, and the system feels a bit less sluggish. So I'm trying the same thing on Vision (my 64-bit system with 4GB RAM) but it's not working. The only thing I did different was to do the "chmod" command before doing the "swapon" command. But now swapon throws an error saying: "swapon failed: Invalid argument" When I used rm to delete the swap file, rebooted, and tried again following exactly the steps that worked on Bishop, I get both the "insecure permissions" error *and* the "invalid arguments" error. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Further update, I've noticed that Bishop (my 32-bit system with the 2GB RAM)is freezing up after it's been left unattended for some time. I'm guessing that the Power Management system is hibernating it and now that I've deleted my swap partition, that's not working. So I definitely need a swap file on Bishop. Last time I tried to create one though, I couldn't figure out how to make it work. Today, I think I got it right. Here's what I did in my terminal. # sudo fallocate -l 2G /mnt/2GB.swap # sudo mkswap /mnt/2GB.swap Output: Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 2 GiB (2147479552 bytes) no label, UUID=d6104677-6cd1-4801-8cd6-efb6074963e7 # sudo swapon /mnt/2GB.swap Output: swapon: /mnt/2GB.swap: insecure permissions 0644, 0600 suggested. # sudo chmod 600 /mnt/2GB.swap # sudo swapon /mnt/2GB.swap Output: swapon: /mnt/2GB.swap: swapon failed: Device or resource busy # sudo swapoff -a Output: swapoff: cannot find the device for UUID=b0f783b0-d459-4ef4-b863-ea1141302763 # sudo swapon /mnt/2GB.swap # swapon -s Output: FilenameTypeSizeUsedPriority /mnt/2GB.swap file2097148 0 -2 Then I edited /etc/fstab, commented out the line under the comment about the swap partition added during installation (now deleted), and added this line to the end: /mnt/1GB.swap none swap sw 0 0 Now to reboot, and see if it works. Wish me luck!
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Some quick updates on my swap experiences. I reinstalled Flidas with no swap partition on Vision (the 4GB RAM laptop). I tried creating a swap file, but kept running into "invalid argument" errors when I tried to "swapon -a", following the instructions in the pages I linked in my previous comment. I had the same issue on Bishop, my older 32-bit laptop with 2GB RAM. I did an experiment on Vision, doing everything I could think of to use up RAM; two music websites playing songs, two PeerTube videos playing, another video playing on VLC, and other programs open including GIMP, LibreOffice, and Transmission. With all that running I was topping out the CPU and the second PeerTube video was getting choppy but I'd only used 75% of my RAM according to the Mate System Monitor. So it's pretty clear I don't need swap space reserved on Vision unless, as MagicBanana always says, I want to hibernate the system. It might be good to have a 2-4GB swap file on the root partition of Bishop. But when I checked the Mate System Monitor is seems the swap partition hadn't been activated during install, even though I had manually set it as swap space during the install. Maybe the installer detected my SSD and is configured not to use swap partitions on them? I deleted the swap partition using GParted and rebooted, and I haven't noticed any performance issues without it, so maybe I don't need swap on Bishop either?
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Since I posted my last comment in this thread, I replaced the HDD in my laptop with an SSD and maxed out the RAM at 2GB. Just recently I bought a more powerful laptop which I also had an SSD installed into, and maxed out the RAM at 4GB. I've been doing some reading to see whether or not it's a good idea to use a swap partition on SSDs and opinions are mixed. Here's a good example of this debate: https://askubuntu.com/questions/404096/with-an-ssd-do-i-need-to-change-my-swappiness-to-increase-ssd-life Some comments suggest that less damage is done to the SSD if swapping is discouraged by reducing swapiness (see: https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/linux-swappiness/ ) and that a swap partitions does more damage to the SSD than a partition with a file system because they can use TRIM. Others say that recent SSDs are much more durable than the early ones and none of this matters. Either way, with the newer laptop, 4-8GB seems like a lot of space to reserve entirely for a swap partition. So I've been reading about setting a swap file on the root partition instead. Here's some instructions I found: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-swap-file-linux/ When following these, the command: # swapon -a ... threw an error about "insecure permissions 0644, 0600 suggested." A solution to this is described here: https://www.rootusers.com/managing-swap-space-in-linux/ If anyone knows of more reliable references for these topics, or even better, pages on the Trisquel wiki, please share links here.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
I've spent a lot of time in the past cleaning up the messes of people's borked Windows systems. By default, Windows PCs always have the OS and user files in the same partition, so when the OS dies, as it inevitably does, you have to painstakingly back up all the users files onto a sufficiently large external drive before you can do a reinstall, or install a new OS. Learning from this experience, I always advise people to have separate partitions for / and /home. This means you can easily reinstall your OS, or switch to a different distro, without having to copy the entire contents of your primary drive to another drive first and re-partition from scratch (note: it's wise to do a fresh backup of anything mission critical before making any such changes to do your drive). I find a 16GB partition for / is usually enough (anything larger than 30GB is really a waste of space). On my systems, I always have a second primary partition the same size, which I use for testing new versions or distros that I'm thinking about using, or just curious about. At present I have two swap partitions the same size as RAM, one to go with each primary partition, but from now I will just use one, for reasons Magic Banana has explained in previous thread on this topic.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
I think he means '/', not the superuser directory 'root'. / that we call root has no name.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Well thank you all for your responses. I think I'm gonna go with /root, /home and /swap. Just because why not, right? There aren't any negatives to having partitions (assuming that they are done correctly). I think hehe.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Regarding "the rest of the disk for /home", I don't see so many drawbacks. Most "average users" are highly unlikely to re-partition their HDD/SSD. They tend to accept and keep whatever they are provided.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
With 4GB of RAM I'd suggest having a swap partition. Just in case, who knows how many applications will be running at some point all at once. So, if the computer supports using MBR, this is my suggested partition scheme: / ext4 60GB /swap 2xRAM size = 8GB /home ext4 all the rest = about 425GB This way you have a huge root partition, you will probably never run out of space, even after installing every application that is remotely interesting to you. You also have twice as much swap as RAM, so you are never likely to run out of that too. And you still have way over 400GB for home, which is huge imho. If you want to store lots of videos in HD, you will need an extra drive anyway.
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Here's my partitioning schemes: MBR partition table, BIOS/Legacy boot firmware: /, /boot, /home, swap GPT partition table, BIOS/Legacy boot firmeare: bios boot, /, /boot, /home, swap GPT partition table, UEFI boot firmware: /boot/efi, /, /boot, /home, swap So 4 or 5 partitions are more than enough for "average users".
Re: [Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
The average user only needs one partition to avoid the root partition overfilling. But if you are in the habit of reinstalling and want to keep old data, a separate home partition would be nice to have. MBR choice depends on your hardware and firmware. BIOS boot expects MBR, UEFI can use GUID GPT. Use MBR if you have a disk 2 TB or less. MBR supports four primary partitions. I use two partitions, root and home, no swap.
[Trisquel-users] Partitioning for average end user.
Hello, I'd like to hear your thought whether or not partitioning is necessary for your average internet dwelling hooman. I have a 500GB HD, 4GB of RAM. How many partitions would I need. Should I just have 1 for root, 1 for /home. Using MBR that would ofc be 2 primary partitions, right?
