Space required?

Well hopefully I'm going to get to install 4 of the distros I have (finally got a Linux rig) tomorrow afternoon/evening. I was just wondering how much room each distro needs (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE)? I only have a 40gb HDD (It was a spare, had it laying around), but in reality it's only just over 38gb. So if I gave each distro a 9.5gb partition (9.5*4=38), would that be enough for a successful install for each, including updates, etc.? If not, then how much room does each distro require? Thanks.


-Jesse

Perfectly safe to share the swap space. I do that without any problems. I'd say that 9Gb each for the OS and 2Gb for the swap partiton would be enough. Bear in mind that you can't do this with primary partitions (only 4 per disk), so you'll need to put some of them into an extended partition. That's no problem - Linux is quite happy booting from a non-primary partition. When you've decided which distro you like, 36Gb will be more htan enough.

While that may be the case, like i said before it all depends on how many packages you install. You will save a sizeable chunk of disk space with no OO.o, but then you won't have office functionality (provided you don't install another office app or don't use google docs). The same goes for other programs as well. Back when I used fedora, it liked to install packages that did similar things, so it used a bit more space.

Anyways it is just better to allocate more space to start so you won't run into growing pains later.

-Zorak

The amount of swap you should use depends on four things:

1. How much RAM do you have?
2. Do you intend to use suspend-to-disk?
3. How much memory do you intend to use?
4. Are you running an i386/i686 distro or an amd64/x86_64 one?

- Old rule is to have 1.0-1.5x as much swap as RAM.
- If you intend to use suspend-to-disk, you must have *at least* as much swap as you do RAM, else you will not be able to suspend to disk without making some changes to s2disk and the kernel (suspending to a file rather than swap.)
- If you have a ton of RAM and don't think you'll exceed that amount, you can have a much smaller swap partition or even omit the swap.
- If you are running an i386 distro, you can't make swap partitions bigger than 2 GB.

Hahah, knowing linux hackers, they will see that comment, and write their own custom procedure to handle more than 8 swap partitions and then create a system comprised of more swap space than system space just out of spite! ;D

-Zorak

Its just like i like to say "Every rule has an exception, even that one"



-Zorak