Note that I said "the ability ", not "the requirement ". As we saw with the first installation above, the absolute minimum number of partitions required for a Linux installation is one. That has not always been true, but it is certainly true of every Linux distribution I am familiar with today. Now, before all the experienced and semi-experienced Linux users panic and start writing nasty comments, let me say that one partition is not a typical installation, and it is almost certainly not an optimal installation, but it is possible.
I will explain more about this below. Keep in mind that when you are a Windows user who has absolutely no experience or knowledge of Linux, and you're trying to make your first Linux installation, getting through the door with a minimum installation that actually works is a lot better than just standing outside confused and intimidated by information about root, boot, home and so on.
One of the all-time worst ideas that was ever foisted on PC users was that four partitions on a disk was enough.
That is the limit for MBR disks. Unfortunately, by the time Microsoft realized how stupid that arbitrary and very small limit was, it was too late. Rather than really fixing it, they came up with yet another kludge to glue on top of it - the concept of "Primary" and "Extended" partitions. An "Extended" partition can then have any number of "Logical" partitions within it. Well, at least they were starting to learn a little bit - I would have expected them to impose some arbitrary limit like four, or maybe a very adventurous sixteen on the number of Logical partitions, but at least they managed to avoid that.
The new limits were then a maximum of four "Primary" partitions or three "Primary" and one "Extended" partition, and no limit on the number of "Logical" partitions within that one "Extended" partition. We have managed to live with these limits for quite a few years, and they are what you are likely to have on any PC which was purchased with Windows until sometime after Windows 7 was introduced, when they started switching to GPT partitioning.
Well, maybe that's not entirely right, I heard some rumblings about GPT partitioning with Windows Vista, but since you can't even get Microsoft to admit any more that they every made anything called "Vista", this is difficult to pin down. No matter, I suppose.
Now I need to relate all of this partitioning information to what Linux needs, wants and can make use of. First, what does Linux need? As I said above, Linux systems today require a minimum of just one partition, to hold what we call the root filesystem - if you will excuse my cringe as I say this, root is roughly the equivalent of the Windows C: drive.
A typical Linux installation will need somewhere between 4GB and 8GB of disk space, and you need at least a bit of space for user files, so I generally make my root partitions at least 12GBGB. Next, what does Linux want? That's a bit more tricky, because it gets into questions which cross over between functionality and personal preference. The other partition that most nearly all Linux installations have is a swap partition. This will only be used if the total amount of memory required for all running applications is greater than the amount of physical memory installed.
That means it is possible to install a Linux system without a swap partition, if you are willing to accept the potential limitation on the total size of running programs you can have. How large should the swap partition be?
Don't ask. That depends. Something like KB or 1MB. That's probably not enough today If you never run anything but a web browser and an email program, you might not need a swap partition at all.
The rule of thumb that I use is to create a swap partition which is at least equal to the RAM memory, and preferably double that. But honestly, that has little more basis in fact than reading tea leaves, or dissecting a frog and reading the entrails. If you don't have a swap space, or you don't have enough swap space, you'll find out because you will get "out of memory" errors.
If you have too much, who cares? As long as you are not short on disk space, it doesn't matter. One other partition that falls between need and want is the boot partition. This is where Linux has traditionally kept whatever it needs to boot, including various kinds of binary and configuration files. It has been kept in a dedicated partition for a couple of reasons over the years, but the most common has probably been that the Linux kernel has progressed with new and different filesystem formats much faster than the various Linux bootloaders have.
No Linux system is going to use FAT for the root partition, so you have to have a separate boot partition for this. If you have an ext4 root partition, and use Legacy boot not UEFI , then you don't need a separate boot partition.
You can have one if you want, though. There are several other partition uses that fall in the "can make use of" category. One common example is the home partition. This is just what the name implies, a separate partition which contains all of the ordinary users' home directories and files.
But again, this is not required and Linux can be installed and used just fine with the home directories in the root partition. I think you're probably getting the idea by now. Use them if you want, they can be good for logically separating things and preserving them across other changes. Whew, that was a lot of text even by my standards. Let's break it up with one more example installation, before I try to summarize it all.
This time I'm going to look at the installer for openSuSE, because it does a couple of things that the first two examples didn't do. That long list of partitions looks pretty scary, but don't worry it's only there because openSuSE uses a btrfs file system by default. Fortunately openSuSE gives you the possibility to change the parameters it uses to make the Suggested Partitioning and get an updated automatic proposal.
You can also see in this window that openSuSE gives you the choice of having a separate home partition, and of the filesystem type to use if you have one. Click OK to return to the Suggested Partitioning window, which will then show a new proposal based on using ext4 for the root filesystem. That looks a lot more reasonable, especially compared to that long list of partitions shown in the first proposal. Customize the Taskbar in Windows Browse All Microsoft Office Articles What Is svchost.
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Modern systems often include hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, however. As a consequence, recommended swap space is considered a function of system memory workload, not system memory. The following table provides the recommended size of a swap partition depending on the amount of RAM in your system and whether you want sufficient memory for your system to hibernate.
The recommended swap partition size is established automatically during installation. To allow for hibernation, however, you will need to edit the swap space in the custom partitioning stage. Recommendations in the table below are especially important on systems with low memory 1 GB and less.
Failure to allocate sufficient swap space on these systems may cause issues such as instability or even render the installed system unbootable. Table 9. At the border between each range listed above for example, a system with 2GB, 8GB, or 64GB of system RAM , discretion can be exercised with regard to chosen swap space and hibernation support. If your system resources allow for it, increasing the swap space may lead to better performance.
Note that distributing swap space over multiple storage devices — particularly on systems with fast drives, controllers and interfaces — also improves swap space performance. Swap space size recommendations issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Automatic installations of these earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 still generate a swap space in line with these superseded recommendations.
However, manually selecting a swap space size in line with the newer recommendations issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
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