AVL-MX21 installer partition options

[dsh]

How to go about telling AVL to use the entire disk? Is there an option to use an autoconfiguration?

After selecting use the entire disk, this appears:



The partitions are a windows installation. Should I simply delete the partitions to continue?

Do I need to provide custom partitions? If so, which partitions are required and how much space is recommend for each?

Thanks very much in advance!

[soundscape]

The partitions are a windows installation. Should I simply delete the partitions to continue?

The answer depends on what you want to do. It sounds like you don't care about having Windows anymore and want to use the entire disk for AVL.

• What I would do (and what I did) is first boot GParted from USB, and make the partitions how I wanted them. Then, install AVL.

• Incidentally, it does look like GParted is included with AVL (System->GParted). So, one could run GParted from the AVL Live USB. I just personally like doing partitioning with a standalone GParted-only Live USB disk.

• For me, repartitioning meant resizing a partition to provide enough available space, and use that space to create a large enough ext4 partition for the AVL installation.

• For you, repartitioning might mean deleting all the partitions you don't want (e.g., the Windows ones), and creating the one(s) that you do want.

• In any case, IMO pre-preparing the partitions for the AVL installer to have a straightforward task made things simpler.

There is a section in the AVL Manual about partitioning (page 15, "Installation Suggestions"). I tend to agree with it. The main point is to have a partition for the OS (minimum 25GB, personally I went larger to accommodate downloaded or temporary-transfer files), and a separate partition (or disk) to store data and work files. That way, the OS could be reasonably reinstalled without messing up critical (work product) files, even if the OS installation somehow gets messed up. Backing up files to an external target is also emphasized.

Do I need to provide custom partitions? If so, which partitions are required and how much space is recommend for each?

The answer to this is simply "no". It sufficed for me to provide only the "root" ("/") directory, which I had previously formatted as ext4, and the installation went smoothly.

Personally I was okay with not having a swap partition, since I will not be suspending and I have plenty of RAM for my use case. And I was okay with having the home directory located on the same partition as root, since I just store temporary downloads for file transfers there.

I hope this helps. Just .02, the best solutions depend on your needs I think.

[dsh]

Thanks!

I'm just confused because typically for partitions I just select the option to allow the installer to automatically do it for me. I assume there's swap, tmp, root, home, etc., but I'm not sure what the system is expecting. Ubuntu for example has a default partition configuration to select from. That's why I'm a little confused with the AVL installer.

Sometimes e.g. with Fedora there's an option to use an LVM which has a default configuration as well.

[soundscape]

Makes sense. Yeah, I found this screen a little confusing, too (thought I did merely skim the information in the left panel).

To clarify FWIW, I personally just specified one big-ish "root" partition on that screen (I'm using a separate disk for data/work-files), and the rest went automatically apparently during installation. By automatic, I mean that home directory was just seamlessly put in the the only place it could logically go because I did not specify a home partition, no swap partition was used because I did not specify one, etc. (and I fortunately anticipated and was fine with those choices).

Sorry to not be of more help about how to use the "Choose partitions" screen. Good luck!