problems installing on an SSD

[MCP]

never ever will this drive see Windblows installed. If by any chance I would need it it had to live inside a box, a Virtualbox

Thanks again as.

Same here.  Mine is a small Samsung drive so it would make sense to give it to windows since I have so little there and use it so little.  What fun is that?  I almost did though when I had so much trouble getting trim to work. (Was my own fault I keep screwing around with fstab while playing with other installs too then had trouble following the directions for testing trim ) I had no problems partitioning, just used my gparted like I always do.  Haven't used diskdrak for partitioning since a little mandriva disaster.

When I reinstalled PCLOS on my new ssd, I just let the installer do all the partitioning.  Everything works just fine, but I wonder if I got the best arrangment.  What do you think?

MCP

[aguila]

never ever will this drive see Windblows installed. If by any chance I would need it it had to live inside a box, a Virtualbox

Thanks again as.

Same here.  Mine is a small Samsung drive so it would make sense to give it to windows since I have so little there and use it so little.  What fun is that?  I almost did though when I had so much trouble getting trim to work. (Was my own fault I keep screwing around with fstab while playing with other installs too then had trouble following the directions for testing trim ) I had no problems partitioning, just used my gparted like I always do.  Haven't used diskdrak for partitioning since a little mandriva disaster.

When I reinstalled PCLOS on my new ssd, I just let the installer do all the partitioning.  Everything works just fine, but I wonder if I got the best arrangment.  What do you think?

MCP

Well, honestly - I'm thinking the same as you. I wonder if I got the best arrangement... 

[DeBaas]

Check wit gParted if the SSD geometrics are correct, that is, first sector of first partition is 1024 or 2048, not 63.
Size of the PCLinuxOS system partition ( / ) at least 12G (Full Monty 20G)
With these partition sizes you can freely update and add programs.
Swap partition ( swap ) 2x memory size.
Home partition ( /home ) all you want or on HDD.

my 2cts
Ed

[MCP]

Check wit gParted if the SSD geometrics are correct, that is, first sector of first partition is 1024 or 2048, not 63.
Size of the PCLinuxOS system partition ( / ) at least 12G (Full Monty 20G)
With these partition sizes you can freely update and add programs.
Swap partition ( swap ) 2x memory size.
Home partition ( /home ) all you want or on HDD.

my 2cts
Ed

I just checked the first sector is 63.  Now what do I do?

MCP

[DeBaas]

Google 4k alignment SSD

Maybe you find the right tool to re-align. See your SSD manufacturers website.
If it's a brandnew install do it again, but first remove all partitions, do NOT use the automatic PCLos partitioner but use gParted to manually create the partitions beforehand, as gParted already uses the 4k alignment as standard.
Windows Vista and 7 (not XP) should also create 4k aligned partitions (on an empty disk/SSD)
With the PCLinuxOS LiveCD use Synaptic to download/install gParted, partition your SSD with gParted and now start the PCLos install, assigning the / , /home and swap partitions manually.

This will speed up your system amazingly.

You can also create a gParted LiveCD/USB
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Ed

[TheQuest]

Hi DeBaas

Check wit gParted if the SSD geometrics are correct, that is, first sector of first partition is 1024 or 2048, not 63.
Size of the PCLinuxOS system partition ( / ) at least 12G (Full Monty 20G)
With these partition sizes you can freely update and add programs.
Swap partition ( swap ) 2x memory size.
Home partition ( /home ) all you want or on HDD.

my 2cts
Ed

May I ask if the use of 2x Memory for swap is a must on a new system with 16GB of memory?

Seem a lot of space to use, considering the cost of an SSD.

Take Care
TheQuest 

[Xenaflux]

If it was mine, I would use 1 or 2 Gb of swap.
I don't see why SSD should need more swap than HD

Xx

[Nish]

My first partition is at 2048 on my SSD, I did nothing special - just used what I think is a fairly recent version of gparted live CD.  The mechanical drive in the box starts at 63 and is where I located linux swap in addition to windows. As my SSD is just 60GB, I decided not to put the swap on it and use any of its precious space for something I don't use. I originally tried a 10GB system partition size with another distro and ran into out of space problems when I updated that distro so I installed PCLOS on the larger partition.  I might reclaim that space, just expand the PCLOS partition.

I did have an awful time determining that trim is working.  It was just hard for me to follow the directions I found on the web (you will find a few versions of "the test" out there).  I did have one disaster in the early testing out the drive and trim and when I got confused and I put discard on an ext3 partition, oh that was funny!  Do not put discard on the root partition if it is ext3, it makes the partition read only.  Took me awhile to figure out what I did.

[DeBaas]

About swap, (mostly not used)
When you use a large database or many programs at the same time exceeding your memory it has to swap out that memory to the swap partition. Standby mode keeps your system memory and swap. Sleep mode has to keep swapped memory AND all system memory wriiten to swap. Unused memory, or made available by swapping, is used by diskbuffers.
If you NEVER use sleep mode 1x mem is enough.
If you NOT use the pae or 64bit kernel, your max is 8G.
When sure not using that much programs, even working without swap is possible.
But virtual(box) machines do use a lot of mem. For faster acces you need also some diskbuffer space.

CU
Ed

[Xenaflux]

But virtual(box) machines do use a lot of mem. For faster acces you need also some diskbuffer space.

How much would XP or win7 need
How much would linux( in Vb ) need.
I know....it depends on ta-ta-ta....But can you give a rough estimate

[DeBaas]

Virtual box
XP, 512M-1G
Vista or 7, 2G-4G
Linux, 384M-1G (http://www.pclinuxos.com/?page_id=10)
And graphics 32M-128M

[Xenaflux]

Vista oder 7, 2G-4G

Thanks
I am supposed to install win7 in Virtualbox today on a brand new unit.
I planned for max 2 Gb swap as it has 4Gb RAM, but will follow your advice, as I have 750Gb of HD space and only 200Gb of data to fill it up.

Xx

[pags]

Vista oder 7, 2G-4G

Thanks
I am supposed to install win7 in Virtualbox today on a brand new unit.
I planned for max 2 Gb swap as it has 4Gb RAM, but will follow your advice, as I have 750Gb of HD space and only 200Gb of data to fill it up.

Xx

Well, it also depends what you intend to do with the virtual installs.  I've run 7 in 1GB without issue, and am currently running 7 (32-bit) in 1.25G and the 64-bit in 1.5GB.  I also have a 1GB XP, as well as an XP with 2.5 GB...
The 2.5GB XP is probably my slowest, because of the host server (older, possibly dying, hardware; doing other processes; running a crap OS - U****u at work)...all the others I've mentioned are on a newer laptop.

Experiment a little.  It's easy to change the settings for a VM.

[TheQuest]

Hi DeBaas

About swap, (mostly not used)
When you use a large database or many programs at the same time exceeding your memory it has to swap out that memory to the swap partition. Standby mode keeps your system memory and swap. Sleep mode has to keep swapped memory AND all system memory wriiten to swap. Unused memory, or made available by swapping, is used by diskbuffers.
If you NEVER use sleep mode 1x mem is enough.
If you NOT use the pae or 64bit kernel, your max is 8G.
When sure not using that much programs, even working without swap is possible.
But virtual(box) machines do use a lot of mem. For faster acces you need also some diskbuffer space.

CU
Ed

Thank you for getting back, also thanks to the all other that answered.

Never use sleep or Hibernation.

Using, kernel-2.6.38.8-pclos3.pae/bfs,

New system :- [so far]

Zalman GS1200, Asus P9X79 PRO , Intel i7-3960X, Asus HD7970, 16GB RipjawsX DDR3, SSD 256GB Crucial M4.

Had to do a clean install with PCLinuxOS KDE 2012 [020212], because my remaster would not install [first time it [they] has failed].


Take Care
TheQuest  

[DeBaas]

To use the SSD as system with max space, use a swap partition on HDD.
Be aware, when swap has to be used, on SSD it's faster, but I think you can live with swap on HDD.

For M$ users, M$ uses it's swapfile a lot, there you should leave the swapfile on SSD.
Also it's growing to mem size, and another file is created in standby and sleepmodus.
These files are NOT deleted after creation.