Hey guys,

Well recently I bought a cheap second-hand laptop, and I have decided to install antiX on it. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to linux, having never used it before. I was just curious as to what to use for the partitions.

I have a 60gb HDD and 192mb of ram. Should I set home to use root? What sizes would you recommend I use? Are applications installed on root or home? How big should I set swap disk too?

Cheers for the help,
Mike.

Hi! Welcome to Linux and antiX, Mike.
In my opinion you can use home inside / (root), not separate.
Programs are installed inside / (root), scattered through /usr, /lib, /etc. That, as I know, is just a way of ordering things. Some programs can run completely from its own folder (like Firefox, for example).
antiX occupies little space, less than 2GB, and as I view it you should reserve just enough space for it to expand with new programs and leave the rest of the disk for data and eventually other systems. That is no more than 4,5GB for root would be enough (unless someone knows a situation where more would be needed, but I don't).
When you run the installer, you press the 'Execute Gparted' button in one of its pages and it will open the partition program. In my model here you would create a 4,5 GB partition for / (root) (in ext4 since it's a more modern filesystem - but there are folks who still use ext3), a swap partiton of two times your installed RAM (384MB) and leave the rest for data (if by any means some partition must be read by a Windows system, like if you have a network, you may format it with NTFS but if not needed, format it with ext3 or ext4 since NTFS still may have some issues).
After the system is installed you can create folders in your data partition like, say, 'music', 'films', 'work' etc. and then symlink (symbolically link) them to your home folder. That's very easy to do and what that means is you may access them as if they were in your home folder but their data will be in another partition, so you may eventually reinstall the system without touching them.
If you do so you may ask here and we tell you how to do it and also how to set your data partition to auto-mount at boot time of you want it to.

Ah wow, that was a great post, thanks a ton.

Just one more question, so I set home to / (root) and not to the data partition? And then I use symlink on the data partition to make it appear in home?

If yeah, then I would very much like to learn how to symlink them and set the data partition to auto-mount.

Cheers once again,
Mike.

Jonesy1128,

For a comprehensive look at a good way to set up your partiions and how to access them, check out SilverBears site, he is a regular at MepisLovers, and helps out here also.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.sblinux.org/pages/symlink-home.html"
linktext was:"http://www.sblinux.org/pages/symlink-home.html"
====================================
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false


cheers,
oldhoghead

Aha, that was very helpful, should be all good now.

Thanks a ton for the excellent support __{{emoticon}}__

Mike.

Just for you to know, you can easily create symbolic links with the ROX filer (Menu>Tools>Filers>Rox if you're using 8.5rc2).
Open two ROX windows, one where the source directory is and one where you want to symlink it; drag the directory you want to link to the other window; ROX will offer the options to link (absolute and relative), move or copy; choose Link (absolute).

Absolute linking is used if you won't move the source directory, relative link is used if you'll move the linked and the link together, e.g. in a directory with icons the same icon has several names, one of them is the original and the others are links ('shortcuts' in Windows) to it. These links being relative to one another you can move the directory to somewhere else and the icon files will keep linked.