Till now I was windows user. From now on I want to use only Linux.
I have 500Gb HDD. How do I partition it properly? I read that there is no right or wrong way, but still, I am confused. I did something and I have primary partition mounted on / (160Gb) which I believe is a OS and 350Gb extended partition of which I have 4Gb of swap and 346Gb mounted on /home.
I got used to C:\ and D:\ partitioning, but I don't see file system in that way. I am lost. Where is what? How can I make C:\ partition for OS and D:\ for apps, movies, music, photos. Or what I want is Windows way and I have to get used to Linux way?
Best Answer
Linux is not all that different to MS-Windows:
Gnu/Linux an improved and Free Unix. MS-Windows is based on MS-Dos that is a poor clone of CPM that was inspired by Unix.
There is one main difference: Gnu/Linux and all Unixes have one root, one unified hierarchy, and therefore no drive letters. MS-Windows, DOS and CPM have multiple hierarchies, one for each drive/partition, they are given letters (e.g.
c:
). On Gnu/Linux home will be mounted on /home, it will be there no matter if it is on the same partition, a separate partition or a network share. The advantage of this approach is that the name of files is not dependant on the location of the storage device. The advantage of the Ms-Windows, dos, cpm way is that is was easier for the operating system programmers when they wrote the operating system.Sub-trees (from other partition, disks or network share etc. ) can be grafted on, but there is one tree per computer. You can even share sub-trees between computers using network file shares, but they are sub-trees not new trees.
Type
mount -l
on a command line to see all mounts. Note this includes a few special mounts that have no backing store. Alsodf -h
to get usage info.Example from my system:
/
[equivelent toc:
] is on primary hard-disk partition./lib/init/rw
we have a temporary ram based file system. (probably used by init, process 1, probably best it ignore it)/proc
we have the proc file-system. This is magic, it is a dynamic file-system, it can tell you lots of cool stuff about you processes/system./sys
we have the sys file-system. (see what I said about/proc
)/dev
we have udev. udev manages/dev
./dev
is a where lots of magic lives, lots of things that you may not think of as files live there: partitions, audio/video input output, keyboard, mouse, a black-hole (/dev/null
), a source of nothing (/dev/zero
), etc./home
is another disk partition. This is where users directories are. [Equivalent to?:\User
on modern Microsoft os, where ? may be C, or something else]./media/extra
is an external hard-disk./media
is a place that external drives get mounted on automatically. In/media
is also a directories/media/cdrom
and/media/cdrom0
the first a reference to the other. They are empty directories, but if I put in a cdrom. Then the cd appears here. [ Equivalent torandom-letter-of-the-day:\
]more examples:
/dev
is the directory that raw devices live in./dev/sd*
are disk partitions./dev/sda
is primary hard disk/dev/sdb
is secondary hard disk in my case an external one./dev/sd?1
is first partition of a disk. 1,2,3,4 are primary partitions, 5,6,7,etc are secondary partitions.