Hello all, sorry for such a newbish question, as I should probably know how to properly partition a hard drive, but I really don’t know where to start. So what I’m looking to do is install a Debian distro, RHEL, and Arch. Want to go with Mint LMDE, Manjaro, and Fedora. I do not need very much storage, so I don’t think space is an issue. I have like a 500+ something GB ssd and the few things that I do need to store are in a cloud. I pretty much use my laptop for browsing, researching, maybe streaming videos, and hopefully more programming and tinkering as I learn more; that’s about all… no gaming or no data hoarding.

Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the “run alongside” option? or would I have to manually partition things out? Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros, etc.? hoping you kind folks can offer me some simple advice on how to go about this without messing up my system. It SEEMS simple enough and it might be so, but I just don’t personally know how to go about it lol. Thanks alot!!

  • Macaroni9538OP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I mean SHOULD I make an efi partition? I have no clue if I need it or if it’s optional. Simple is better in my case lol. SOO just trying to put it all together so far. first create a roughly 8gb fat32 partition for swap? Then a 60gb ext4 partition for distro 1, then so on with the other two partitions and thats it? how does the storage partition work? what format should that be? and I was reading about mount points and stuff, what ought I know about those?

    • Lvxferre
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      If this is a plain computer (desktop/laptop): I’d simply turn EFI off and call it a day.

      • Macaroni9538OP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Sounds good to me. If I dont really know what it is, then maybe I dont need it enabled

    • Gurfaild@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      If the installer doesn’t automatically create an EFI partition, you can create a small FAT16 or FAT32 partition (a few hundred MB should be enough).

      The swap partition is just a swap partition - that is the partition type you select in your partitioning tool.

      The storage partition can be any format you want. If you don’t need to access it from Windows, just use ext4.

      Mount points are similar to drive letters, but more flexible. You can read these Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

      • Macaroni9538OP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Thanks again. So did you mention it’s not really necessary to install an efi partition? Idk if I need it or not? or is it just better safe than sorry, sorta like a swap?

        • Gurfaild@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          If you install your first distro without creating any partitions manually, the installer will probably create an EFI partition. Maybe it wouldn’t need to create one on your specific system, but it will probably do it anyway.

          • Macaroni9538OP
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            gotcha! now how would that storage partition work? like do you point each distro to that partition? is that how that works?

            • Gurfaild@feddit.de
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Usually you create an entry in /etc/fstab that tells the system which partition should be mounted where. I’d do that in each distro once you have installed all of them.

              • Macaroni9538OP
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                But how do you know which partition should be mounted wear and Im sorta confused by that statement. Like what do you mean by “where”? Aren’t they all on the same hard drive, so wouldn’t they all just mount to your drive?

                • Gurfaild@feddit.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  It’s similar to how drive letters work in Windows: the partition you installed it on is C:\ and you can assign any other letter to any other partition.

                  On Linux, the partition you installed it on is / and you can mount other partitions in any empty directory.

                  • Macaroni9538OP
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    I understand. Would I mount all partitions to root? also I just thought about something; what about gpt format? I know that is used for linux but where does that come in? like are ext4 and gpt the same types of things or different types of formats for different things?