Pre-install setup help, please.

[chezler]

First off; Hello My name is Charlie. New on the forum. Pretty new to Linux.

I have installed Linux twice in the past just to test the waters, knowing that one day I would drop Windows for good. That day is rapidly approaching since a Windows update borked one of my Windows 10 installs a few weeks ago. I really don't like W10, I mainly use Win7, But its days are numbered.

I had Open Suse on a dual boot with Win XP years ago. Had Ubuntu on triple boot with Win7 and 10 about a year+ ago. Didn't do much in it either time, but boot regularly to play around. I'm ready to get serious now.
I want Kubuntu 18.04 LTS on my laptop for now, and will eventually do a dual boot with Win7 on my desktop.

I have built many Windows based computers, both from new components and from salvaged components. Also maintained them and updated and upgraded as needed. Somewhere between 50 and 75 total. Also, I worked for 10 years in a production facility as Asst. Quality Mgr. where, as part of my responsibilities, I had to maintain and upgrade 20 production floor computers as well as teach people how to use them and enter data.
I have been using since 1985, and building since Windows 98.

I say all this so that you will know that I am 69 years old and know a little bit about computers. A programmer I am not. Everything I have done in CMD I have done with assistance. Either a person, a forum, or a book.

What I need assistance with now is setting up my SSD prior to install.

I have: Toshiba laptop (S855) i7 3630QM Ivy Bridge 2.4GHz running between 2.8 and 3.2GHz. - 16 GB DDR3 - Intel HD graphics 4000 - Realtek RTL 8723AE wireless n PCI-E NIC - 2 USB 3.0 ports.

I have a Sandisk Ultra 32GB USB 3.0 stick with Kubuntu ISO installed and ready to go.

I have a 1TB Crucial MX500 ssd (new, never used) that I am going to put in the laptop for the install.
It curently has a 500 GB ssd with W10 that , for the next few months, will be moving in and out of the laptop as needed. I think that because of that, the BIOS will see it as a dual boot, not sure.

Eventually, when me and my laptop are settled into Linux, That ssd will be used to put Linux on the desktop computer. (I do have my W10 current setup cloned to another ssd in case it is needed.)

Man, I think I've said too much already, and I haven't even asked a question.

Partitions. Need a UEFI of ? size. 512 MB, 1GB ? What I've read makes it kinda vague. The best answer I've found is to make as big as you need.
Does Kubuntu have EXT4 as default? Can't find that answer. I've read that it uses or can use ZFS. I like the Idea of that file system if it can be used reliably.
If EXT4, do I need a swap partition?

What size?
Do I need any other partitions? I've seen examples of systems with 1 partition using the whole drive, and I've seen others with several.

I believe I should be able to just boot to the thumb drive, and the installer will do what it thinks is best. (For most people).
I want what is best, fastest, but mainly most stable.
I am here for the long haul, not just playing around. I want Windows off my computers.

I have been watching Linux for a good while. Reading a lot of forums, watching a lot of videos. Linux has all the programs I need and they have grown to where I can switch from the Windows versions without missing anything. I am into photography, and want to pursue astro-photography. Linux has what I need.

I am ready to make the LEAP. (pun intended)

I know this is a long post, and I hope some one can de-cipher what I said and maybe help get me started.
Thanks, in advance
Charlie

[Don B. Cilly]

My current EFI partition is 1008 MB. It is reported as using 8.6 MB, leaving 999 MB free.
With 16 GB of RAM, I wouldn't worry about swap. At all.
Partitions, it can be a good idea to set up a separate one and give it /home as a mount point.
So you would have three. One mounted on /boot/efi, (FAT32) one on / [root] and one on /home. EXT4, BTRFS, or whatever you like.

Kubuntu uses EXT4 by default (I think), but you can choose from quite a few file systems.
Apparently BTRFS is a good idea, but I wouldn't really know.

Now, Kubuntu's present installer is called Calamares. It means Squids and pretty much behaves as such... just kidding :·)
The one point of it that I personally find puzzling is:
At partitioning, it asks for an EFI partition. You set it up, and when you click Next to actually do the install, it says, pretty much: your EFI partition doesn't have an ESP flag. You can click Back and set it, or proceed without it, which could render your system unstable. So you go Back and ESP is not in the list of flags available for the EFI one.
As a workaround to this I exited the installer, pre-partitioned the disk with GParted, which does have ESP, and went back to it. There may be others.

[jglen490]

The last time I set up my desktop unit for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS, I did some UEFI setup work and from there is was reboot with the installer thumb drive and interact with the magic.

My UEFI changes included setting to UEFI (Legacy is NOT necessary, and in fact is a hindrance), disabled Secure Boot (although with *buntu having a keystore included that may not be necessary - but do it anyway), made sure AHCI was set and not RAID/lvm, with the thumb drive inserted made sure it was the first thing on the boot list, saved the UEFI settings, and rebooted. Shortly, the installer came up. I made sure wifi was started and working, then hit the install icon.

I set the usual keyboard, user name, time zone, etc. settings. When the screen displayed that asked for install options, I selected "Something Else". Then the first partition was the EFI partition (ESP) which I sized at 500MB (for a single boot machine, that is overkill!). Once the partition is declared for EFI, the installer automatically sets the necessary flags and sets it for fat32 formatting. The next partition was the / partition (at least 25 GB, give it 40GB if you have the space) which I selected to format with ext4, then /home which gets a LOT of space also ext4, and then a SWAP partition of about 16GB (about equal to RAM).

Since then I replaced a drive with an SSD, but left the larger spinner in place, but the structural setup is about the same:

john@john-Desktop:/media/john$ lsblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE LABEL UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                      
├─sda1 vfat         E38A-9EC5                            /boot/efi
├─sda2 ext4         a11e2d42-980f-411f-9c73-dab5ff616804 /
└─sda3 swap         8827d90e-1afe-4832-b99b-ea74570c42e4 [SWAP]
sdb                                                      
└─sdb1 ext4         09e6b59d-ce4c-4f26-a606-5351c3daf769 /home

sized as:

john@john-Desktop:/media/john$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           1.6G  1.5M  1.6G   1% /run
[B]/dev/sda2       219G  6.7G  201G   4% /[/B]
tmpfs           7.8G   31M  7.8G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
[B]/dev/sda1       380M  6.1M  374M   2% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb1       293G   95G  183G  35% /home[/B]
tmpfs           1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/119
tmpfs           1.6G   16K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000

The / partition is way over sized, but I had a cheap SSD on hand and wanted to keep all my data and changeable stuff on the spinner, there it is

[chezler]

Thanks for the info. Very helpful.

I will go the GParted route.
I have 1TB to work with, plus several internal drives I keep most things on ( using a docking port)
So 500MB for UEFI, 100GB for ROOT, 16GB for SWAP, leaves a big /HOME.
May set another or two, Not sure yet.

Appreciate the help, and will mark this "solved" soon as I have a running system

CJ signing off,...(for now)

[Don B. Cilly]

Bear in mind that Linux only allows for 4 primary partitions.
And extended partitions... take up a partition to start with. Meaning you make them inside an extended "tree" which takes up a primary.
You can put pretty much everything in extended ones... except probably the EFI stuff.
So - as you have lots of space and may in future want to add partitions for other systems - it might be a good idea to set up an "extended container" partition into which you can then add lots of extended ones.

Now, this is
- Not very clear, and
- Probably not very correct either.
So, maybe someone more knowledgeable that me can help clarify, I just know that if you set up too many primaries it then becomes messy to set up extendeds, so if you're thinking of eventually "expanding", it's a good thing to plan in advance.

[jglen490]

The last time I set up my desktop unit for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS, I did some UEFI setup work and from there is was reboot with the installer thumb drive and interact with the magic.

My UEFI changes included setting to UEFI (Legacy is NOT necessary, and in fact is a hindrance), disabled Secure Boot (although with *buntu having a keystore included that may not be necessary - but do it anyway), made sure AHCI was set and not RAID/lvm, with the thumb drive inserted made sure it was the first thing on the boot list, saved the UEFI settings, and rebooted. Shortly, the installer came up. I made sure wifi was started and working, then hit the install icon.

I set the usual keyboard, user name, time zone, etc. settings. When the screen displayed that asked for install options, I selected "Something Else". Then the first partition was the EFI partition (ESP) which I sized at 500MB (for a single boot machine, that is overkill!). Once the partition is declared for EFI, the installer automatically sets the necessary flags and sets it for fat32 formatting. The next partition was the / partition (at least 25 GB, give it 40GB if you have the space) which I selected to format with ext4, then /home which gets a LOT of space also ext4, and then a SWAP partition of about 16GB (about equal to RAM).

Since then I replaced a drive with an SSD, but left the larger spinner in place, but the structural setup is about the same:

john@john-Desktop:/media/john$ lsblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE LABEL UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                      
├─sda1 vfat         E38A-9EC5                            /boot/efi
├─sda2 ext4         a11e2d42-980f-411f-9c73-dab5ff616804 /
└─sda3 swap         8827d90e-1afe-4832-b99b-ea74570c42e4 [SWAP]
sdb                                                      
└─sdb1 ext4         09e6b59d-ce4c-4f26-a606-5351c3daf769 /home

sized as:

john@john-Desktop:/media/john$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           1.6G  1.5M  1.6G   1% /run
[B]/dev/sda2       219G  6.7G  201G   4% /[/B]
tmpfs           7.8G   31M  7.8G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
[B]/dev/sda1       380M  6.1M  374M   2% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb1       293G   95G  183G  35% /home[/B]
tmpfs           1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/119
tmpfs           1.6G   16K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000

The / partition is way over sized, but I had a cheap SSD on hand and wanted to keep all my data and changeable stuff on the spinner, there it is

Sorry, forgot one key element and that is within the Kubuntu installer process I set the partition table (both drives) to GPT (NOT ms-dos), so primary/logical partitioning is not an issue. I did not pre-build the drives with a separate gparted session, I did ALL the partitioning within the Kubuntu installer.

[jlittle]

ext4... partitions...

ext4 is the default, yes, but...

At some stage, I suggest you consider btrfs. One of its (many) advantages is that sizing partitions is not needed; different subvolumes are used for / and /home and they share free space. A small EFI fat32 partition, possibly a swap partition, and the rest one big btrfs. Multiple installs can all go in the same btrfs.

There's stuff to learn to gain the other advantages, but there's a core of users here at kubuntuforums.net giving great support. However, you could choose btrfs, install, and be done.

[chezler]

Good points there, both of you.
Working on other things right now, but will be back on the computer later tonight. More studying to do.
I do have Secure Boot disabled. Have to decide what I need now, and what I think I will possibly need later.
I understand the primary-extended thing, so thanks for bringing that up.

I misunderstood the GParted thing, so I will try the installer first.
Thanks again
Can't have too much help when diving into strange waters.

Thanks, jlittle, for jumping in there. I have been looking at both btrfs ans zfs. They both look like they are here to stay. More studying.

Signing off for now. Back this evening.

[jglen490]

You can do BTRFS if you want. Please research it first.

DISCLAIMER: I do not use BTRFS, nor will I. While it undoubtedly has great utility as an enterprise tool, it is not necessary for a small single user system. ext4 provides native journaling and Linux has all the tools available that are needed to properly manage, maintain, and update a stable Linux installation.

[Qqmike]

re BTRFS, I'm with jglen490 on this one. Stick with ext4 for now. If you do try BTRFS,

jglen490: Please research it first.

Don't roll all the dice in just one throw. Spread it out. Reduce the variables.

[Don B. Cilly]

Sorry, forgot one key element and that is within the Kubuntu installer process I set the partition table (both drives) to GPT (NOT ms-dos), so primary/logical partitioning is not an issue.

That's very nice to know.
So, having, at Oshunluvr's suggestion, converted MBR to GPT on my latest disk - which was surprisingly easy - I can now have up to 128 primary partitions on that disk, right?

I did not pre-build the drives with a separate gparted session, I did ALL the partitioning within the Kubuntu installer.

Just out of curiosity, how did you deal with the EFI partition not having the ESP flag complaint?

[chezler]

Great insight from every one, thanks.

I've spent the last 3 hours looking at file systems. A lot of info, and a LOT of strong opinions.

For starters, I will use ext4. This is my first real dip in the pool. Want to keep my head above water till I've learned a good bit more. Plus, this will be my main computer and I want all the 'bilities. Stability, Reliability, User ability, Capability, Dependability, and there are more I know.

Once I have used this thing a while, and crammed a lot of BASH into my head, I will start on my desktop. I will do a lot of experimenting on that one.

A new one, to me, is F2FS. That shows some promise for SSDs, which is what I am using.

AND as I am using SSD, should I turn off journaling with ext4? I read that on a lot of posts, to save on read/writes and extend the life of the drive.
Does journaling really cause an excessive amount of read/writes? Has something like that even been tested to see the facts about it?
That's one more thing I need to research.

From the benchmark tests I've seen ( and I know, grain-of-salt, benchmarks and real life usage can be vastly different), ext4, XFS, and F2FS seem to be the fastest file systems on SSDs.
Some of the testing I'll have to do at a later date.

[jglen490]

Glad you are getting good info! When I moved to an SSD for use with the / partition I kicked myself for not doing it sooner. Fantastic out of the box performance - even from my cheap SSD. You don't HAVE to do anything to tune the performance of an SSD, and it is not necessary to turn off journaling just because you are using an SSD. The technology continues to improve. I continue to use a spinner for /home because that's where a lot of changes do occur, and so from an abundance of caution I don't want to use an SSD there just yet. It'll happen some time, just not now.

Along with that, there are new file systems being developed all the time. I have not heard of F2FS, but until it is proven and well supported it's not likely replace anything for a while. I saw an article on Phoronix a day or two ago talking about an up and coming filesystem named BcacheFS. It holds a lot of performance possibilities, but in my mind not enough to be concerned with for a small, single user Linux. ext4 is still more than adequate from a performance standpoint.

[oshunluvr]

I'm going to throw one thing in here (since my name was already dropped ). I disagree with the advice to start with ext4 instead of btrfs and (other than btrfs has a zillion awesome features) here's why:

1. You're new to Linux and it's file systems so you're learning anyway. Why not learn BTRFS from the start?
2. BTRFS is 1000 times easier to use than EXT4.
3. Backups: EXT4 requires external software. BTRFS has built-in backup features.
4. Partitioning: With EXT4 you will have to decide in advance how much space you want for each partition, how many partitions you need, and you better guess well because re-partitioning is difficult and dangerous. BTRFS you will not need partitions because you can use subvolumes instead.
5. RAID: With EXT4 you have to use external software to use RAID and you must have clean partitions (no data) to make any changes. BTRFS has RAID built-in and you can change RAID types or remove it on-the-fly (without even rebooting).
6. Adding drive space: With EXT4 when you add a second drive, you must partition it, mount it, and the space will always stand alone from your main drive. With BTRFS you can add or remove drives or partitions at will to increase or decrease your available drive space anytime you want - also on-the-fly.
7. Snapshots: EXT4 does not have snapshot capability. BTRFS has snapshot features built in. I have an automatic daily snapshot taken and take one manually whenever i think I might do something potentially dangerous like changing video drivers. It takes me less than 20 seconds to roll-back to the previous snapshot. With EXT4 you may have to re-install to recover from a damaged upgrade.

There's much more that's cool about what you can do with BTRFS that you can't with EXT4 but the above is enough reasons. IMO, anyone sticking to EXT4 is afraid of change or just stuck in a rut. It's the "well, we've always done it that way" syndrome. There's very few reasons to have any drive space EXT4 and those reasons are small in comparison to the benefits. <- I'm not calling anyone specific out here, just my overall opinion.

BTW, the Kubuntu installation supports BTRFS and will separate your / from your /home automatically at installation. You won't even know it happened.

Here's my suggestions on how to proceed; Install the new drive, boot to the USB Stick and before installation, pre-partition the drive to your liking. Using GPT (gdisk from the command line is the easiest) partitioning, make an EFI partition (see my comment on EFI below), a swap partition the size of your RAM, and the rest use for your installation. OPTION: If you want some "playground" space to muck about with - like for additional installs or virtual machines or whatever - add a fourth partition. With 500GB you won't be running out of space anytime soon. A fully loaded Kubuntu install will rarely exceed 16GB or so.

Then run the installation. Using BTRFS you'll only have to select the one partition for installation and mark it as /. As I said your /home will be in a subvolume so it will be separate (more on that at a later time). The installer will detect and use the swap partition without help and I believe will detect and use the EFI partition also.

Once the install is up and running, learn how to do snapshots. You can look at /etc/fstab to see your mounts and you'll see that the root subvolume and home subvolume are mounted just like partitions are, except they will be on the same partition sharing all the free space rather than being limited by an artificial boundary. To take your first snapshot, you will need to mount the root BTRFS file system, navigate to it, and make a snapshot of both your subvolumes. I've even written a set of Dolphin menus you can add to your system that will allow you to create, transmit (backup), and delete snapshots from Dolphin (the file manager) without using the command line.

Keep the live USB stick around for a while in case you break something right away - many of us do.

Obviously if you go with the ancient EXT file system, you'll need more partitions - at least one more for /home. In that case, you'll probably want to increase your install partition to 30-40GB so there's space for /tmp and the occasional large file. If you use Apache and plan on a Nextcloud install or something like that you'll also need a separate /var partition. See how much work EXT4 is over BTRFS already?

EFI Comment: Since you're booting Windows occasionally, you'll probably have to use EFI when you install Kubuntu. Otherwise you will have to go into BIOS to reset things when you switch. I'm not the expert on this topic, not even close, so I'll let others advise on that.

[oshunluvr]

Re. F2FS; I've played with it a bit but I can't say I saw any real benefit to it. bcachefs is too new to use and not in the kernel yet. It's supposed to have the features of btrfs and ZFS but with better performance. ZFS isn't in the kernel and never will be and is not as easy to use as BTRFS and has fewer features. BTRFS has built-in SSD support automatically and *ubuntus handle housekeeping (TRIM) automatically via a cronjob.

IMO, it really it boils down to features vs. speed. There's no doubt BTRFS is slower than other file systems in most cases. In a production system where millions of data transactions occur all day long, a few milliseconds a minute add up to real time saved. But in a home environment, the amount of time you spend managing EXT4 and XFS and multiple partitions and drives, etc., more than kills any minute speed advantages during processes.

Literally last week I found my main install damaged after an update - booted to a black screen - a classic and common complaint. I rebooted to the terminal, navigated to my snapshot directory, changed to the previous day's snapshot and rebooted. Took less than a few minutes. Had that been an EXT4 install, who knows how long recovery would have taken? Maybe days or longer.