formating a laptop hard drive so I can run linux. whats the best format to do ?

Ive to format a hard drive for a laptop which is the best format it too fat 32 or linux format or ?

 

FAT32 for Lunix is your best choice.

 

wth?!?! linux uses extended filesystem so i would suggest you stick with default ex3 or recent stable ext4. do not attempt install linux on fat32 because it will, with no doubt, fail.
@sodaman
we are not talking about comodore here

 

Im formating a laptop hard drive., and putting linux on it. wasnt sure which format was best for linux I do now thank you

 

if you are partitioning manually do not forget to put 2xRAM sized swap partition. i would recommend also separate system partition and one separate partition for /home if you have enough disk space

 

ext3 .. 4 will not boot if your distro doesn't default install the needed ext2/3 filesystem drivers. Your distro installer will decide on it's preferred default filesystem and partitioning scheme.. I suggest as you need to ask such a basic question you are a newb.. so let the distro builders make those decisions till you get some experience. I use / /boot /tmp /var /home and /backup partitions spread across 2 drives... makes keeping the junk in order and running weekly cron based backups very easy.
I don't know why this question has even come up..obviously somebody isn't reading enough about the different flavours of linux and all their specific forums and wikis to have much of a clue... every installer comes with it's own preferences..
I would be more worried about unsupported hardware with a laptop.. especially the wireless side of things.

2xram for swap? .. that's from the ark babes.. when you have 512 ram or more you don't need more than 512 swap area.. I have 2 gigs ram and a 256 swap.. and the swap right now after 5 days uptime is using 175k
It's easy to allocate more IF you run out.. but I haven't ever seen a system run out with 512... only ran out once on 256.. and that was transcoding 3 avi's at once.

some things are still hanging around from 386 days when maybe 4mb's ram was common.. you NEED swap with a setup like that.. these days with huge memory arrays it simply isn't true that 2xram for swap is needed... in fact I am seriously thinking about allocating some of my unused space as a ramdisk.. say 125mb's.. as swap... because I never see it used on a normally running system with 512 or over.

 

set one and make it 0mb's .. *giggles* that will keep the installer happy and you can ditch it in fstab later.

look who has been playing with BSD partitioning schemes.

 

well since i was installing oracle, due to 1 gig of ram it asked 2 gig of swap, so just to be sure. you can always allocate it later. if you have big disk 1 gig of swap doesnt mean anything. mine after 3 days of uptime is 72MB. always be prepared.

 

but oracle isn't linux.. it's a bsd based huge array database application sitting on a common or garden unix implementation.. obviously a massive multiprocessor unix variant will demand a large swap/cache space.... oracle now own sun.

what does oracle variant sfsd unix have to do with linux filesystems?

 

by being not able to install from .deb on ubuntu due to a lack swap area. just a reference to swap size comment.

 

I don't see in my post which you quote where I said anything about swap space with relation to linux... don't try moving the goalposts by then going on about ubuntu.. I was asking why you were using a mainframe unix implementation as an attempted justification for swap, as oracle and linux are about as far removed from each other as you can get without going into QNX or VMS world..

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-swap-space.html

Normal desktops shouldn't need any swap these days.. if for some reason it runs out attempting to use some either disable a load of idle processes which are hogging ram doing nothing or stick a small hdd in and mount as swap with fastb temporarily.

ubuntu memory management is known to be rather poor, but can be fixed with some editing. Too many TSR's load and hang around instead of killing themselves off properly.. Compared to the same system running the same apps on debian, ubuntu will use double or more ram. That's shoddy memory manager development when compared to the parent core system. They may use the argument that they are "cutting edge" or "trying to replace windoze" and that people have huge drives and heaps of ram.. .. sorry.. they shouldn't be building from sleek fast debian then.. try bloaty frdora as a base instead.. Somebody at canonical needs to sit down and look at improving it.. they are going against the linux lean and fast philosophy in too many ways.

Interesting article.. I want to get away from swap entirely if possible. Any dormant application should be killed instead of being allowed to sit in ram doing nothing.

 

cant say i dont agree with this at least

 

Actually, I didn't know one needed the ext filesystem to run an application. Thank you. In theory, most any filesystem could do. Debian Linux has libraries that allow it to read & write HFS+ transparently; even when it requires switching the order of each byte in software!

Why swap?

Your OS will always need to swap to avoid thrashing your disk, but you're right, one will not need a separate swap partition, if you maintain your computer properly: (1) if you partitioned your drive so a seldom written partition has much extra, contiguous free space, or (2) you regularly de-fragment free space (not files) with an application or a backup & file-by-file restore. With disk space in excess these days, I should vote for a separate swap partition. Even Apple creates one.

A good OS will page your memory needs to little scraps scattered about your disk. However, as pages are separated, the table in RAM needed to find them grows. When the resources for this virtual memory become low, to avoid thrashing the disk, your OS is supposed to swap the largest application, to free up RAM & pages. So, swapping is an important 'fall back' mechanism.

MacOSX 10.4 (which fragments free space) once reported 'Insufficient space to create swap3. 7GB disk space available.' Running was just a web browser, mail, & and large editor, to cut & paste. I had 7 GB of disk space, but insufficient contiguous space on it for a 5 MB application.

I suggest the rule that swap space be 2x RAM may still be a good one if an application is going to initially require swap space, if you run many commercial applications, or if more than one huge application will be used at once.

It's only the big ones that are painful. By 'dormant' I know you mean useless, and by 'kill' you mean 'quit normally' (as some forms of killing leave pieces lying about, taking space). Just wanted to clarify this, as a Unix or Linux that pages is perhaps the best OS for multi-tasking.

Linux is for multi-tasking

A good disk cache & memory manager, one that pages, will not let these little-used processes occupy much RAM; and it anticipates the needs of the ones being used by paging during quiet moments. This should be an OS of choice for listening for the phone, polling one's mail, and securing one's computer.

If you Bank over your Computer

When I had only a laptop, I installed a paging OS and had all possible routes of entry transparently guarded for malware, using 'Snort' and 'ClamAV'. If something dangerous appeared, a script stopped the process, blared a siren, and displayed a big, red warning sign with details. I noticed no performance drop, though I had only 256Kb of RAM.

If there is no need to swap, no performance drop should be noticed when adding new, small processes. However, if your OS can no longer page, even switching windows can require a painfully slow swap.

 

Sorry, forgot this.

When burning any optical disk, I quit all applications I could (including the energy saver). Creating some DVDs also required I first create a copy in UFS format on the hard disk, requiring much contiguous disk space.