wiki/doc/guides/howto-root-home-swap.md

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How to have root, home, and swap partitions created during OM Lx installation true 2020-03-13T10:59:06.035Z documentation, howto, user-guide, advanced

How to have root, home, and swap partitions created during OM Lx installation

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.

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. {.is-info}

To do pretty much anything you need with partitions you want to select Manual partitioning

root-home-swap-01.png

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.

Select Manual Partitioning

root-home-swap-02.png

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

root-home-swap-03.png

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.

So we create them one at a time. Select Create

root-home-swap-04.png

Follow the steps in the dialog box and you will end up with something like this

root-home-swap-06.png

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 that 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 its 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. {.is-info}

This is a screenshot of what the Create dialog window should look like for your /boot/efi partition on UEFI/EFI system:

root-home-swap-05.png

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