Suggested partitioning scheme

[mr_raider]

I'm looking at dual booting Win 8.1 and 14.04 on a desktop. The PC has two drives, an SSD (480gb) and rotational drive (1TB). Currently in windows, all my programs and PC games are installed on the SSD, and all the user libraries (Videos, Downloads, etc...) are on the HDD. I can free up space easily on the SSD, HDD or both for kubuntu.

Kubuntu will be running basic browser for internet, email, office software, as well as acting as a PVR for OTA recordings (myth TV).

What is the suggested partitioning scheme? Should I Put / on the SSD and /home on the HDD? I know a lot of config files are in home, maybe they would be better off on the SSD for maximum speed.

[oshunluvr]

IMO: You need 3 partitions for Kubuntu if you are using ext4; swap, root, and home (if you use btrfs you need only swap and root).

Since you have an SSD your best overall performance (obviously) will come by having as much as possible on the SSD - including swap. There's a lot of FUD out there about not doing that because of "excessive wear" however, do the math yourself and you will see the life-cycles of the SSD will likely out-live the HD. You should set your mounting options to prevent unnecessary access - like using "relatime" or "noatime" and running trim (discard) as a cron job, not as a mounting option.

Back to your question: I would put Kubuntu's three partitions on the SSD and then have shared access to the windows data partition on the HDD. That way all your media ("libraries" in the linux world sounds like /lib files - I'm using "media" to avoid confusion ) is available to both OSs. If you're keeping the lion's share of your media on the HDD, your home need not be very large. Maybe 20GB for root and the same for home. Then either link to the media using symlinks or bind mounts.

Without knowing your media storage structure, I can't offer specific instructions, but you would basically create a mount point for your HDD partition, then after install, delete media folders in your home and recreate them as links. Like /home/you/Documents would point to /media/hdd/Documents - something like that.

Bind mounts work by mounting an already available location to another and allow you to mount a part of a filesystem instead of the whole thing. Using a bind mount would mean leaving your home folders as is and then mounting specific location to each of them as desired. Like: mount -o bind /media/hdd/Documents /home/you/Documents. This can be done in fstab also.

For sanity, I suggest mimicking your HDD media storage folder structure in your Linux home to match how you have them organized in Windows.

EDIT: BTW, Along with using the SSD as your main drive you should then create an automatic backup to the HDD and reserve the space to do that on the HDD. Might as well be as safe as possible with your data.

[mr_raider]

I am familiar with TRIM and noatime options, etc... I was more interested in space allocation and organization.

What I want is ~/Downloads, ~/Videos, ~/Documents, ~/Music etc to be on the HDD. This way if have to re-install the OS, I I dont loose the documents. Symlinks sounds interesting, but would it not be simpler to just have /home on the HDD? Since my wife also uses the PC, I would have to symlink all the stuff in her profile too.

How big do all the hidden files in a home partition get? How much space should leave for / ?

I never use a swap file on my laptop and has 4 gigs of RAM! The desktop has 8gb.

Can you symlink to an NTFS partition? Won't that FU the permissions?

[Teunis]

Yes go with oshunluvr's suggestions.
Depending how many applications and kernels you install and keep around you can go a little smaller on the /, once I ran into a significant problem when during an upgrade all the temp files filled up my root, since I use ~15GB it never again happened.

The tip on linking works a treat, On this laptop I have 2 Kubuntu's and Win7, one of the Kubunutu /home partitions is really small and after installing it I just dragged (in split screen Dolphin) the relevant directories from the bigger /home to the small one, including some of the hidden ones like .mozilla and .thunderbird.
Upon dropping them I selected 'link' and where necessary I allowed it to overwrite the existing (new and empty) directories.
You won't know the difference with a real presence.

Sure you can't set permissions on an ntfs disk but who cares?
If you want to protect the Windows stuff from your wife just make the drive inaccessible or even hidden (for her).

[mr_raider]

If I mount an ext4 disk partition to /media/hdd how will the permissions default?

If I mount an ntfs disk partition to /media/hdd how will the permissions default?

[Mike_]

If I mount an ext4 disk partition to /media/hdd how will the permissions default?

Linux will honor the (numeric!) permissions - so if you have a two linux systems, make sure the user id's are the same on both.

If I mount an ntfs disk partition to /media/hdd how will the permissions default?

You can set the uid/gid/umask that should hold for all files on the NTFS HD in the mount options - so it's up to you who wil get r/w access to those files.

One more thing, your home really should go on a ext or btrfs file system because some programs, KDE including, create links in your config directory!

[mr_raider]

Linux will honor the (numeric!) permissions - so if you have a two linux systems, make sure the user id's are the same on both.

More specifically, if I mount a blank ext4 partition in fstab to mountpoint, which users will have rw permission for anything created on that partition?

[Mike_]

More specifically, if I mount a blank ext4 partition in fstab to mountpoint, which users will have rw permission for anything created on that partition?

Whoever has write access to the parent directory of the mount point after it is mounted. So for the first time you have to set the permissions right and then they are stored (as permission of the "file" ., the current directory)

[mr_raider]

Whoever has write access to the parent directory of the mount point after it is mounted. So for the first time you have to set the permissions right and then they are stored (as permission of the "file" ., the current directory)

So logic would dictate that create a sub folder within the mount point, one for each user. Then set ownership of each sub folder to the appropriate user. Then create symlinks with the users subfolder from the directories I want to move.

[Mike_]

So logic would dictate that create a sub folder within the mount point, one for each user. Then set ownership of each sub folder to the appropriate user. Then create symlinks with the users subfolder from the directories I want to move.

This will definitely work, just make sure that the main folder is world (or at least group) readable and executable.

[mr_raider]

This will definitely work, just make sure that the main folder is world (or at least group) readable and executable.

I just realized KDE has a built in function in the system settings that allows me to set the library folder (Video, Music, etc...) locations anywhere I like.