(This is not a problem, but I couldn’t find a suitable section in the forum to start this thread. If this is not the right place, then it will just have to be moved.)
So before installing Salix on my laptop, I’m looking for some advice.
This laptop comes with UEFI and has a 240GiB SSD with Windows on it. I won’t keep this OS. I’ve learned to use 3 partitions: /, swap and /home. For this new Linux adventure, I’d like to do things properly.
So, I was planning to do as follow:
– a 54GiB / partition (xfs);
– a 16GiB swap partition;
– a 170GiB /home partition (ext4).
But…
I’ve read on the guide that UEFI systems need a /boot partition so I’ll add one, of course, but here is where my questions start.
(1) How big should the /boot partition be? On my other PC (UEFI and SSD, too), I have a /boot/efi (vfat) partition of about 250MB. The Start-Up Guide says “If you prefer to let Salix do everything including partition management, just select AUTOPARTITION.”… Well, when I’ve installed Salix on a VM with the salix64-xfce-14.2 ISO, the Autopartition option was missing. This is no big deal, but I mention it anyway. Since it was not available, I had to do it manually. The VM didn’t seem to need a /boot partition, but I guess the computer will, and I couldn’t find any information on how big it really has to be.
(2) Since this laptop will be used for development purpose (mainly), is it relevant to have a separate /home partition? I’ve read here and there both people saying it is relevant and cleaner and people saying it’s making things more difficult to handle. I end up not knowing who to believe…
(3) On the “Partition Management with cfdisk” page, I read this:
Actually, still when installing Salix on a VM, the bootable option was just not available. Taping B made nothing, but I guess this is because the installation first made me use cgdisk (and cfdisk the second time… can’t figure out why, since I did the same things twice ).Make this partition Bootable (with 'B'). Use the up and down arrow keys to select a particular partition, if there is more than one. The default partition type is 'Linux' so that partition is done.
(4) So the / partition should be xfs. Let’s say I have no separate /home partition. No problem for external HD, I guess? (Stupid question, but I’d rather be stupid for 2 minutes than remaining ignorant.)
These are all the questions that come to my mind for now.