Linux Mint

I got a new HP G56 laptop two days ago, and have been aching to install Linux on it ever since I first turned it on to be greeted with a bombardment of register prompts, from Windows 7, HP, Cyberlink, Norton AV, the list goes on. So I downloaded the DVD of Linux Mint, as I’ve heard lots of good reviews on version 10. It’s very sleek looking, and I am an advocate of having all the codecs and programs you typically want from the get-go to be already installed in Linux distros that are geared towards people who just want Linux to work out of the box. The installation failed the first time, and the partition manager is tricky to work if you actually understand what you’re doing, since you don’t actually create your extended partitions for yourself, you need to specify that a chunk of your HDD is to be logical, and then you just keep formatting chunks of that to create your extended partitions. The fact that HP had already done me the service of creating four primary partitions didn’t help either; when I shrunk the Windows 7 partition I was left with an unusable partition of 400GB, until I removed the recovery partition (if I need to recover my box I’m probably just going to format it anyway). So then I specified the 400GB to be an unused logical partition, and selected “change…” on the free space (very counter-intuitive I think, since I would consider myself to be “creating” partitions), and specified 9 further partitions. I think this is the base line I’ll be using when partitioning in future for 400/500GB drives. I’m wary about going up to ext4 still, after Torvald’s rant on the format, and even though I’m using ext3 I’m not entirely sure that I need journaling in my filesystem.

2GB, swap

/var : 7GB, ext3

/usr : 18GB, ext3

/usr/local : 15GB, ext3

/tmp : 10GB, ext3

/home : 200GB, ext3

/ : 10GB, ext3

rest : unused, to be used for installing future Operating Systems.