Partitioning and Touchpad

[doublesix]

I have had great success with Kubuntu Hardy Beta on an Acer Aspire 4520 notebook. I do have a couple questions though:

- I usually set up a 200MB /boot partition and a / partition in addition to /swap. Is this enough? How big should my /boot partition be?

- I currently have 2.5 GB RAM, but plan to upgrade to a full 4GB soon. Should I make my swap 8 GB? or should it be a little larger?

- Since KSynaptics is apparently not in the Hardy repositories, how do I turn off tapping? I want to leave the rest of the touchpad functions on.

- Is there a way to adjust the preamp of the sound card? Sound works well, but is much louder in Windows than Linux.

Thanks in advance for the help!

[klerfayt]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

- I usually set up a 200MB /boot partition and a / partition in addition to /swap. Is this enough? How big should my /boot partition be?

is there any point in separate /boot partition for desktops?

- I currently have 2.5 GB RAM, but plan to upgrade to a full 4GB soon. Should I make my swap 8 GB? or should it be a little larger?

heh, if you don't plan to use hibernate (suspend to disk) then I doubt you need swap 2xthe_size_of_ram

- Is there a way to adjust the preamp of the sound card? Sound works well, but is much louder in Windows than Linux.

using kde4? you can run "alsamixer" in terminal

[dibl]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

is there any point in separate /boot partition for desktops?

Only if you are running on XFS filesystem.

heh, if you don't plan to use hibernate (suspend to disk) then I doubt you need swap 2xthe_size_of_ram

I have 4GB of RAM. A 2GB swap space is about 1.8GB more than you will ever use, unless you are encoding videos.

you can run "alsamixer" in terminal

Agreed.

[klerfayt]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

according to some in #kubuntu-kde4 channel kubuntu_8.04_beta comes with kmix, you can have it by pressing alt+f2 and typing kmix

[doublesix]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

Sounds good. I have Kubuntu installed now, and I noticed a new issue. Upon startup, the notebook's display is set to a low brightness, but the OS thinks it's at 100%. The brightness hotkeys work, but it reports 100% at each step.

Here's where it gets interesting. If I launch the power moanager from the panel and then immediately close it, the screens brightness will jump to the highest setting and from then until rebooting the percentage will match the hotkey presses. Any ideas?

[JonPiper]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

I have been using various flavors of linux for over 10 years. I can imagine why you would need more than 4 GB ram. I have never used more than 384 MB and I generally keep 20 documents open and run 10-12 applications open at the same time -- and I hibernate many times a day -- I never found that any swap was used. I have 1 GB ram and 2 GB swap.

Partitioning is very important if you intend to change distributions or upgrade to a newer version. I'm using Kubuntu 8.04 beta and have used every Kubuntu version since 6.06.

You need to have at least three partitions: / (root), swap, and home so that when you upgrade you don't have to format the home partition. This means that you won't need reconfigure your desktop, put in all of your bookmarks and other desktop settings. I have had to reinstall hardy twice and I'm done in 30 minutes plus 15 minutes of tweeking. I have done probably 500 installations for clients and have never been sorry for using this scheme. My partitions sizes are: root - 8 GB, swap - 2 GB, home - 104 GB; the home partition can be any size that is large enough for your user files. I have used a data partition for postgresql data but for the last couple of years I have put that data in a home folder "Data" and have found that works just as well. The "Data" folder keeps you from having to reinstall the data from a backup (or anything else from a backup).

I have missed KSynaptics that is missing from hardy. Touchpad doesn't cut it as far as I am concerned because of the lack of deep configuration like turning off tapping. Other than loosing my network every time I reboot, this is my only issue with hardy.

I think Kubuntu hardy is great and those few kinks will get worked out in time.

Blessings,
Jon Piper

[nilsA]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

Partitioning is very important if you intend to change distributions or upgrade to a newer version. I'm using Kubuntu 8.04 beta and have used every Kubuntu version since 6.06.

You need to have at least three partitions: / (root), swap, and home so that when you upgrade you don't have to format the home partition. This means that you won't need reconfigure your desktop, put in all of your bookmarks and other desktop settings. I have had to reinstall hardy twice and I'm done in 30 minutes plus 15 minutes of tweeking. I have done probably 500 installations for clients and have never been sorry for using this scheme. My partitions sizes are: root - 8 GB, swap - 2 GB, home - 104 GB; the home partition can be any size that is large enough for your user files. I have used a data partition for postgresql data but for the last couple of years I have put that data in a home folder "Data" and have found that works just as well. The "Data" folder keeps you from having to reinstall the data from a backup (or anything else from a backup).

Hi, I'm in the process of making something similar. Par of the fun with Kubuntu is messing up tings every now and then, and hope to resolve the problems.

I have repartitioned a 250 GB disk into roughly two parts, and am at the moment copying the data part of my home user directory to that. When I reinstall - can I just mount that as /home without loosing the data there? Or are there more tricks involved?

[doublesix]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

Thank you for all the responses. I will be using the 4GB of RAM for VirtualBox OSE to run multiple instances of Windows simultaneously and for some video work.

I was able to turn off tapping by putting the MaxTapTime setting in xorg.conf.

The screen brightness issue seems to be sporadic - sometimes after an update it remembers the settings, but after the next update it will go back to the old behavior.

[JonPiper]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

Touchpad woes:

I partially tamed my touchpad with gsynaptics; it sort of a pain to get up and
going because it won't be installed in the menu. You have to add it but there
is no icon - but you can choose one you like. When you install it in the
system tray and attempt to use it, you will find it doesn't work; you have to
edit the button and remove the space in the file name - when you do that the icon you chose disappears - just add it again and you are in business.

With this program it is easy to enable/disable the touchpad and make other changes in the touchpad behavior. It is no KSynaptics but better than nothing.

It does nothing for the screen brightness. The only place you can change that (that I know of) is in KPowersave. Right click on the "electrical plug" in the system tray and select "Configure KPowersave" and go through the configuration you have quite a bit of control over the brightness. I have installed "Hardy" on three laptop computers and it works better than any previous version in terms of power control.

Blessings
Jon Piper

[JonPiper]

Re: Partitioning and Touchpad

Partitioning:

I'm glad you are having fun messing things up - we like challenges. When we
get a beta version of any program we are asking for a challenges but working through them an posting your solution - Hardy has fewer than I expected. That is what open source is all about.

In my opinion, if you have only two partition you need reinstall and resize one of your other partitions. I find reinstalling is the easy way to do this; when installing choose "other partitioning - the last option." I just installed Hardy on a 250 gig Gateway laptop and my partitions are: Windoz
Vista - 60 gig, / (root) - 8 gig, swap - 2 gig, home - 153 gig. This will make it easy to upgrade in the future. Be sure to backup the "home" folder and data from other programs - like /usr/pgsql etc. and any programs and files you have installed from tarballs.

The data from all programs (Postgresql) etc. go in the /home/Data folder. You
will have to re-setup your programs telling them to put the data where you want
it. DON'T FORGET THE BACKUP!!!

Have more Kubuntu fun.

Blessing,
Jon Piper