Here we’re going to cover how to have root, home, and swap partitions created during the install process.
Note: When you read Lx 4, it is meant to include all 4.x versions like 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2. This how-to is applicable to all versions of OMLx including Cooker and Rolling as well as the Lx 4 family.
OpenMandriva installer is Calamares.
It is easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic.
Calamares includes an advanced partitioning feature, with support for both manual and automated partitioning operations.
To do pretty much anything you need with partitions you want to select Manual partitioning
Notice that if you accept the default Erase disk it will create a /boot/efi and / partition only.
The installer by default no longer automatically creates a swap partition because on most all modern computers swap is not used anymore.
First we see how to set up an efi system with separate /, /home and swap partitions as well as the necessary /boot/efi for the efi booting. If you use MBR partition table you do not need to create a /boot/efi parition.
The /boot/efi partition should be labeled with boot. (The partitioner will automatically label it a esp.)
The first step is to select New Partition Table
If the system is efi or uefi boot it must be a GPT partition table.
If it is legacy boot you can select either MBR or GPT. If you don’t know which to use select the more up to date GPT. Also if user has multiple hard drives or SSDs they all need to have the same partition table type or there can be problems. So all GPT or all MBR
Next we will create /boot/efi, /, /home, and swap in that order.
The only critical factor in the order is that the /boot/efi needs to be first the others can be in any order.
/boot/efi is typically a 300 MB partition and needs to be fat16 or fat32 to work. In some other installers its file system type will be called vfat.
If you have what you want select next and when installed your new system will have the separate root, home, and swap partitions.
Note that /boot/efi is a the top of the list in first place. This is necessary.
Note: Your swap partition is probably never going to be used. Only a small minority of users these days really need a swap partition. Those that do need swap already know who you are and can adapt accordingly. Usually swap would be needed by really old computers with not enough RAM to run Lx 4 to begin with. How much RAM is enough? Ideally 4 GB. We do have users running Lx 4 with 2 GB. The Release Notes for Lx 4.0 and 4.1 do say 2 GB and the Calamares installer requires 2 GB. Upgrading the amount of memory in a computer, whether it’s a desktop, tower, or laptop, notebook, is both easy and not that expensive these days. So if your computer is short on memory do consider upgrading.
Swap also may still be used on computers doing very intense level of mathematical or scientific calculating or maybe really intense graphic applications. But those users will know what they need.
It’s true nowadays swap is rarely used but in some cases I suggest to keep it.
In fact on one hand actual CPU times are really to small if compared to disks access times (well I have no real data about SSD disks however I don’t expect their access times can be really compared to CPU times) so the use of the swap partition on disk will slow down performances in an unacceptable way. If in your everyday computing experience you notice your system uses swap partition frequently a better solution will be to add some more RAM to your machine (but usually OMDV kernel is set to avoid the use of swap partition unless it is really needed).
On the other hand if you’d like to use hibernation functionality you need to have a swap partition at least as big as your RAM size (a little bit more is suggested). As said before, for the most time the swap partition will not be used but this swap size is irrelevant with respect to the actual disk size so it is not a waste to reserve a very small amount of disk space to enable this functionality.
Great guide @ben79 I didn’t know how to do that. I created three partitions, /, /home and swap, but OMA was installed just on one partition, on the root one Next time I’d try this way to do it.
Not sure what you mean. The operating system will always be installed on the / partition but there will be some desktop config stuff and settings in /home.
All the partitions either created or designated a mount point on the partitioning page in Calamares during installation are added to /etc/fstab and will be mounted at every boot.
Anyway if you do have troubles ask here and I or someone will help sort it out.
For users with an existing home they want to use you simply select it during “Manual Partitioning” to create a mount point but do not format it. Formating will erase everything in the partition formatted.
Also it is not a good idea (not at all!) to use a KDE4 /home partition on a KDE/Plasma5 installation. To many things are incompatible. There almost certainly will be issues. With other desktops I don’t know for sure. I suspect that the more lightweight the desktop the less likely mixing different versions of same desktop would be. Part of the problem with KDE is they are always changing directories and paths and package and file names between different versions. And sometimes during the same version.
