Installing linux mint 19.1 on second ssd

[zFox]

If I am installing linux mint cinamoon on a second new ssd, do I need to create those partitions with

/ (for main)

Swap

Home

 

 

Or can I just click on the drive and install now without adding any partitions?

[captain_aggravated]

You will have to create at least one partition. That partition can span the entire drive, and / (root) will be mounted on it.  /home will be part of /root, and you won't have a swap partition. 

 

There's a debate as to whether to use an SSD for swap because of the write cycle limitation, I do have a swap partition on mine to enable hibernating and for the occasional overrun, but I seldom overrun my 16GB of RAM.

 

Benefits of having a separate /home partition on a 1-drive install:

1. You can encrypt the whole partition in addition to files/directories in that partition.
2. If you reinstall/change the OS, you can surgically nuke / and leave /home standing, so you aren't forced to restore from backup.
3. If you accidentally bork the file root file system, your /home FS may have survived.

Benefits of one big partition:

1. Avoids the "cannot install or update, / is full" nonsense.  With one big partition, data just sloshes into whatever empty corner it needs.
2. Less complicated.

If you're going to just install an OS and then use it normally for years the way you might with Windows, it's the kind of decision you'll forget you made.

 

The real power is that you can mount /home and swap on an HDD and / on an SSD if you've got the space for all the drives, but that's really a tangent.

[zFox]

6 hours ago, captain_aggravated said:

You will have to create at least one partition. That partition can span the entire drive, and / (root) will be mounted on it.  /home will be part of /root, and you won't have a swap partition. 

 

There's a debate as to whether to use an SSD for swap because of the write cycle limitation, I do have a swap partition on mine to enable hibernating and for the occasional overrun, but I seldom overrun my 16GB of RAM.

 

Benefits of having a separate /home partition on a 1-drive install:

1. You can encrypt the whole partition in addition to files/directories in that partition.
2. If you reinstall/change the OS, you can surgically nuke / and leave /home standing, so you aren't forced to restore from backup.
3. If you accidentally bork the file root file system, your /home FS may have survived.

Benefits of one big partition:

1. Avoids the "cannot install or update, / is full" nonsense.  With one big partition, data just sloshes into whatever empty corner it needs.
2. Less complicated.

If you're going to just install an OS and then use it normally for years the way you might with Windows, it's the kind of decision you'll forget you made.

 

The real power is that you can mount /home and swap on an HDD and / on an SSD if you've got the space for all the drives, but that's really a tangent.

Thank you for your long reply

 

I ended following one of the tutorials on linux mint forums and I made a /(root)  directory and a swap directory of 8gb.
The whole ssd was 240gb. (Linux recognized it as 240 gb but when I used all that space it gave me an error when I tried to install,  I think bios recognized the drive around 220 gb so I used that amount of space to make the partitions and it worked.)

 

When a /home directory is made what kind of things get stored on it?  Does it replace the filesystem storage for documents,  photos,  downloads,  and programs?

 

[captain_aggravated]

7 hours ago, zFox said:

When a /home directory is made what kind of things get stored on it?  Does it replace the filesystem storage for documents,  photos,  downloads,  and programs?

 

There's no replacing going on, you will have a /home directory.  It is indeed where the Documents, Pictures etc. directories live.  /home is the equivalent to C:\Users on a Windows system.  The Mint installer gives you the option to give that directory it's own separate partition.

 

From that question, I'm assuming that you're used to Windows and haven't used a Unix file system before.  A brief orientation:  In Windows, each logical partition gets it's own drive letter, and each drive letter has its own tree structure.  In Unix, there is one, and only one tree structure.  It has one trunk, and that's /.  All other directories on the system are branches (of branches, of branches...) of /.  When you attach a drive to the system, the partitions on that drive are mounted to locations on that tree structure.  I believe the Mint installer gives you the option to set /home, /opt, maybe even /var on their own partitions.  That's optional; If you don't do this, they'll just be created as directories within the same partition as /.  The physical drives themselves and their partitions are represented as files* in /dev, a drive might have a name like sda or sdb, and partitions on them are usually named like sda1 or sda2. Removable drives like USB flash drives should automatically mount in /media/username/drivename.  It doesn't have to, though, you could choose to put them...anywhere.  The Unix file system is more abstract, so virtual space doesn't necessarily resemble the physical layout of data.  Most of the time, it doesn't need to.

 

That's a quick and incomplete explanation, there are lots of great videos on Youtube about it, I recommend watching them.

 

*Everything in Unix is a file.  Everything.  From the hard drive to the keyboard to the display to the network adapter to other computers on the network, everything is treated as a file.