Installation of Ubuntu Dapper

From Erlands Wiki

Installation

The installation of ubuntu dapper are pretty straight forward, the only configuration that is required during the installation is partitioning of the harddrive. This installation description is a description of my own Ubuntu Dapper installations, so it may not suit your purpose.

First, lets talk a about partitioning. You can see my own parititoning schemas below, if you just want to try linux I would suggest that you go with the desktop schema since its the easiest one to maintain.

My personal preferences are:

• My 24/7 server which never is allowed to crash:
  • /var : 4GB (Its important to have this as a separate partion to make sure that log files can’t fill the whole disc)
  • /usr : 10GB (Must be enough for all installed programs and also make roome for further installations in the future)
  • /opt : 10GB (Must be enough for all non deb packaged programs and also make room for further installations in the future)
  • /home : 20GB (Here most of your own files like documents, pictures, movies will be placed)
  • / : 4GB (This must be enough to contain /lib, /boot, /etc, /bin, /sbin, /tmp, among these /lib is the largest on my machine)
  • swap : 1.5GB (Should be at least as large as the primary memory)
• 2. My desktop installation
  • swap : 1.5GB (Should be at least as large as the primary memory)
  • / : 13GB (The rest of the free space on the disc)
• 3. My MythTV media center installation
  • swap : 1GB (Should be at least as large as the primary memory)
  • / : 20GB (Should be able to contain all files besides the media files)
  • /media/video1 : 340GB (The rest of the disc, this partition is for storage of all recorded video and music)

As a preferences the usage on my server looks as follows after a while usage:

• /home : 16GB
• /var/backups/hdup : 11GB
• /usr : 2.1GB
• /var : 1.5GB
• /opt : 216MB
• /lib : 192MB
• /boot : 19MB
• /etc : 15MB
• /sbin : 11MB
• /bin : 4.4MB
• /tmp : 60KB

One way to do the partitioning is to put all the rest of the disk in /home, however my own experience says me that its better to make /home a little smaller and instead create a separate large partition that can contain all really large stuff. The directories on this large partition can then be mounted to different parts of the file system where needed and doesn’t have to show upp on /home. As an example I have a /var/backups/hdup directory that is mounted from a large partition and I also have a /erland/xxxx/photos that works this way. A setup with a separate large partition makes it also easier to add new additional harddrives in the future and just mount their directores where needed.

For filesystem I have choosed to use ext3 on all my linux computers. I previously used reiserfs on a Suse box but the experience with that was not good. At every power break the filesystem check at boot failed and I had to connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to the computer to get it to boot, with ext3 I have never had this problem yet. The advantage with ext3 is also that it is possible to access from Windows in a dual booted setup using the ex2 driver for Windows.

Thats all for the installation itself.

Installation of processor specific kernel

The first thing I usually do after the installation is to make sure I have the kernel optimized for the specific processor in my machine, in my case with a AMD Athlon 64 3500+ this means that i install the “linux-amd-k8″ package and its dependencies, linux-686 is the kernel to use for the latest Intel processors. After installing the kernel reboot to make sure the correct kernel is used.

Update packages

The next step it to make sure all installed packages are updated with the latest patches. You will get a orange star in the upper right corner of the screen that indicates that new packages exists, choose to install them before we continue.