 During Linux installation, you are given a lot of choice over how your system is configured and this is true no matter what distribution you choose. Now, while it is true that if you choose certain distributions, you're going to have a lot more freedom of choice than if you use something like Ubuntu. There is still some level of choice every user is given, no matter what distribution they choose. So if you want to install, say, the codecs for a distribution, a lot of times you're offered the choice to do just that. A lot of times you're given the choice of whether or not you want to do updates during installation. There's just a ton of different choices that you need to make and while the choices do differ between distributions, one of the choices that you need to make during installation, no matter which distribution you choose, is how you want your system partitioned. Now, for the vast majority of people, chances are you're just going to have the installer of whatever distribution you've chosen do the partitioning for you. Now, there's nothing wrong with this. This isn't the way I usually work. It's just simply way easier just to say, hey, install this thing on the whole disk, do your thing and be done with it. Just move on, have it installed and start, you know, setting up and moving on and using your computer. But it's not always the best choice. So if you want to be more decisive on how your computer is set up in terms of partitions, where your data goes, where your apps are stored and all of that kind of stuff, one of the things that you can do is manually partition your drive. And this is actually not as complicated or as scary as it might seem at first look, because most of the distributions that you're going to use have tools that make this very simple. Usually the installer includes its very own partition manager and you can just hop in there, make your changes and move on. It's really not that scary. There are a few things obviously that you need to keep in mind. First, you need to always, and I mean absolutely always make sure you're partitioning the right drive. If you have multiple drives connected to your computer, and you happen to partition the wrong drive, all the data on that drive is going to be gone. And this is always one of the biggest fears I have because I have like six disks connected to my computer. And if I were to delete one of them, it would be kind of devastating. But I've gotten into the habit of always making sure that I'm partitioning the correct drive before I've made any permanent changes. So that's the first thing you have to keep in mind. And it's absolutely the most dangerous thing about anything that we're going to talk about today. As long as you make sure you've done that step, you're going to be just fine. Now the second thing that you'll need to know in order to do this right, you need to know whether or not you're using UEFI or you're using BIOS, because it does change a little bit depending on which one you're doing. Now, one of the things I'm going to show you today is how to do this on BIOS. And I will mention along the way how you should do this on UEFI. Unfortunately, I can't show you because I don't use UEFI. So doing it even a virtual machine seems to be impossible. I'm sure there's probably a way. I just don't know how to do it in a virtual machine without having UEFI on the host. But anyways, the point is that you should know going in which one of those you're going to use so that you can make the appropriate choices as you go along. So I'm going to actually show you how to do this twice because there are a couple of differences depending on what installer you're using. So while I'm not going to be able to cover every single installer out there that would take forever, I'm going to choose the most popular ones. So I'm going to show you in the Ubuntu installer and I'm going to then show you the Calamari's installer, which is used by a lot of distributions, Manjaro, Kubuntu, Arco, the Ruda, you get the point. So let's before we jump in, ask this question, why would you want to do this? And the answer to that question is for multiple reasons. First, it allows you to have more control over where your data is stored. So that might be important to you. But also it allows you to segment your data so that if something happens with your root partition, if something happens with your distro and it goes wonky, your home partition will then be separated from that and you can usually just get that data back very easily. It also allows you to hop to different distros way easier because you can always just take that home partition and transfer it right to the new distribution just like it was made for it. It's just really simple. There are other reasons as well, things like controlling your size of your home partition, things like naming your home partition, if that's something that you wanted to do. There's just a ton of reasons why you'd want to do this instead of having the installer manually partition for you. So let's go ahead now and jump right into this process. We're going to start with Ubuntu. Okay, so here we are in Ubuntu 21.10. Now, I just chose 21.10 because that was the ISO that I actually had on hand. This will work pretty much in every single Ubuntu that you would have access to. Let me just put it that way. They've used this installer for literally ever and I don't think that even when they switch to the new installer, this process will change out that much. So if you're watching this video say a year from now and they've switched to the new installer, first of all, you may not even know that the installer is new, but if they have done that, the process should be exactly the same. So what we're going to do here is click on the install icon and chances are you probably won't even have to do that. If you have booted into the live ISO, say install Ubuntu and it'll take you to this exact screen, I just happened to be in the trial mode. So we're going to run through this real quick. So let's say continue. That's the fine language. That's a fine keyboard layout. And then we will choose just normal installation. It doesn't really matter the choices we're making here. You choose whatever makes sense to you in these questions here. Just answer the ones that are right for you. So here's where we're going to do our stuff. So under normal situations, like I said at the beginning, most people are just going to choose option one here. It will allow the installer to erase the entire desk and install Ubuntu on the entire desk. And in some situations, some installers will just take it and they'll put the root home, all that stuff right on the same partition. And that's just the way it goes. In some installers, they'll create smaller partitions for things like swap. It's not always a guaranteed. If you go through the calamari's installation, you'll see that sometimes they create even larger versions of swap and they give you an option for swap in this particular part of the installer. But that's for people who just want to do the absolute easiest way. For us today, we're going to choose something else. So then we're going to hit continue. And this is the Ubuntu partition manager. Now, for the most part, they've just kind of replicated what you get in a tool like G-Parted or KDE partition manager or GNOME disks or something like that. The UIs may change, but the functionality is for the most part exactly the same. So the first thing you'll need to do, again, like I said, make sure you're choosing the device that you want to partition. If you have multiple drives on there, you're going to have an option for multiple drives. You'll want to make sure you choose the right one. Unfortunately, I can't show you that because I have one drive in this VM. So you'll want to make sure, again, that you're using the appropriate drive. So if you don't know which drive you're using or that you need to partition, you can find out in several ways. So you'll just need to mostly pay attention to how big your drive is. So open up a terminal if you need to find the drive information and do lsblk. Just like so. And you'll see a list of all your drives. Ignore the loopback devices. Just appear because of snaps. Thank you, Ubuntu. But once you get to that, you'll see several things underneath that that will tell you the size of the drives that you have. Some of them will probably have partitions if you have multiple drives. And you just want to look for the one that you know has the appropriate size. That's probably the best way to identify which drive you're needing to partition because you probably know exactly how big that drive happens to be. If you don't know what size that drive is or you have multiple drives of that size, then it's going to be a little bit more tricky and you're going to have to do a little bit of investigation in terms of what device you actually want to partition. This is not a unique problem to manually partitioning. If you go back to this part here and you choose this option, you're still going to be asked what disk do you want to install Ubuntu on, so you're going to have to make this choice either way. I just want to be very explicit and make sure that you know exactly what you're doing on what device you're doing it so that you don't come to regret doing anything manual here because if you accidentally partition the wrong drive, you'll lose data. So I highly recommend if you're going to do this, back up your stuff. That way, just in case you do make the wrong choice, you're not going to be sad later. So let's go ahead and hit something else again. We'll go back here. So the first thing I want to do is select the drive we're going to do. In this case, we're doing and you can see in our list of here, that's our biggest drive. So that's the one we're going to want to partition. It's obviously our only drive in this case. So we can close that. So the first thing I want to do is hit new partition table. Now, it's going to warn you that you're choosing the entire device to partition. It's just making sure that, again, you're choosing the right drive and that if you do proceed, you're going to wipe the entire drive. All the partitions will be removed. So we're in this case, we're going to go ahead and hit continue. You'll notice through this whole thing is that at certain points, Ubuntu will warn you over certain things. So if you're making some changes, it's going to tell you, hey, you're going to, you're making some changes. Are you sure? That gives you an option to make sure you check your work. So what that basically did, that new partition table is it allows you to actually create new partitions. In this case, we have one big, gigantic partition that says free space. It's the entire size of the disk. Now, the first thing you'll want to do, and remember this is something we talked about at the beginning, is we're going to want to create a partition for our boot loader, or our boot manager. In this case, it's going to be grub, and it's going to be a little bit different depending on what your computer is and what you're using. So if you're using legacy BIOS, we're going to create a small partition for grub. It's just going to be very easy, and we're going to, we'll warn you if you don't do this. It doesn't need to be very big. About three megabytes is usually what I make it. So in this case, we're going to hit this plus icon here, and we're going to make this three megabytes. So we'll just do that. Actually, let's go ahead and make it four. I don't know why I decided to make it four. I think it's what I used before. Three or four megabytes doesn't have to be, again, very big. Grub is not very large. And then here under this dropdown where it says use as, you want to choose reserve BIOS boot area. Now, some installers will do this automatically for you. Even if you're manually partitioning, they'll leave a certain amount of space free for the partition manager. I always do it manually just so that I know it's done. Now, here's where it's going to be different. This right here is for legacy BIOS. Okay. If you're using UEFI, you'll want to instead choose EFI system partition. Now, if you're using EFI or UEFI, the size of this one is going to be a little bit controversial because from what I've been able to find out and read is that it varies depending on what you're using. And the sizes that people use tend to vary. So I've seen people use 100 megabytes. I've seen some people use 500 megabytes. For me personally, I would always prefer on giving it more megabytes than it probably needs. So in this case, I'm going to do 500 and you do something like that. And then you hit OK. For me, I'm going to go back to four and go back to reserve BIOS boot area. And then we're going to hit OK. It will do its thing here for a minute. Now, nothing has changed on the disk yet. The next thing we want to do is click the free space once again. Now, you'll notice that there's some free space at the beginning of the disk. Just ignore that. That seems to be something that happens a lot. There's not a lot you can do about it. So let's just go ahead and hit this free space again. You always want to select the free space of the remaining disk. Hit the plus thing again. And now we're going to create a swap area. Now, the predominant idea in the Linux community is that you don't always need swap. And I think I kind of agree with that. I think I even made a video on it about whether or not you needed swap or not. And my response to the whole idea whether you need swap or not is it's really up to you. It really depends on how much memory you have. If you have eight gigabytes, you'll want some swap. If you have 64 gigabytes, chances are you probably don't need it. But it's always good to have. It's one of those things where it's kind of an insurance policy. If you don't know what swap is, it's basically extra memory. That's very simplified, but it's basically what it is. Some applications use it even if you don't need extra memory for certain calculations and stuff like that. So it's always a good idea to have some. So in this case, I'm going to create a two gigabyte swap area. So I'm going to type in 2048, which is two gigabytes the last time I checked. And then again, in the US use as dropdown, I'm going to choose swap area. And then I'm going to hit OK. It will do its thing again. And again, nothing has actually changed. It's just updating the list. We're going to select free space again. And now here's where we're going to choose the root partition. It's going to house everything Linux. It's going to house everything except for the bootloader. And it's going to house all the other directories. So Etsy, VAR, user, all those things been. That's where all this stuff is going to go. And you want it to be a fairly good size because it's also going to be where you install your applications. Probably again, for the most part, if you're using app images, chances are some of those will go on your home directory. But if you're installing from app, or you're installing from snap, whatever, those all install in the root partition. So you'll again want to make sure that it's fairly good sized because once you partitioned, you can't make it bigger. So you'll want to give it, like I said, a good amount of space. I'm going to choose 10,000 megabytes. So just like this, that's one too many zeros. That would have not have worked at all. So in order to do this, what we're going to want to choose is EXT4. You want to make sure that if you're adventurous, you could choose Butterfest or you could choose something like XFS if that's what you want to do. I'm just going to go ahead with good old fashioned EXT4 in this case. And then the next thing you want to do is change the mount point. So you'll want to choose this as root. Okay, and then hit OK. And then the last thing you'll want to do is create your home partition. So you want to select this free space again, hit plus. This time we're not going to change the size because we want it to be the rest of the disk. And then we want to go ahead and again, we're going to leave this EXT4. We're going to choose the drop down and we're going to choose home. And then OK. And that's all there is to it. Now, this last drop down here is just for where the boot loader is going to be. You'll just want to make sure that it's on the top of the disk. So in this case, we want to slash dev slash VDA. If you're on a computer that has just a regular hard drive and it just one hard drive, chances are it's going to be slash dev slash SDA. You'll not want to have it as one of the numbers. You'll want to make sure that it's at the top. So then we're going to go ahead and hit install now. It's going to warn you that there's no EFI system partition found. So this is going to be perfectly OK if you're on legacy BIOS. If you're on UEFI and it comes up with this and you haven't created that UFI partition. Like I showed you earlier, this is going to remind you to go back and do it. You may have the time to start over. If you do it up and to start over, hit revert and just start over the process. If you're using legacy BIOS, it's going to come up and warn you no matter what. Just going to hit continue. It's going to ask you if these changes are OK. This is where it becomes permanent. OK, so you want to make sure that again that you've done everything you need to do on the disk that you need to do it. So you read makes you got the right disk that you have the appropriate partitions. And then you can go ahead and hit continue. And then it'll take you through the rest of installation. So the time zone, which is fine. You'll enter your credentials like so. And then you'll enter a very strong and complicated password and you'll hit continue. Then it will install. Now I will say that manually partitioning usually takes a little bit longer than letting the installer partition for you. So be prepared for this to take a few extra minutes. I'm going to cut the video here and we'll come back when it's done. And I'll show you the outcome. OK, now that that's done, we've seen that the installation has succeeded. We'll hit the restart button. We'll let the system restart. And if everything went correctly here, we'll see the logo and we'll know that everything's working just fine. Now Ubuntu will not show you grub. If you are on a disk that just has Ubuntu on it, it's just going to skip right over grub altogether. If you have another distro or windows on the same drive, it will then show you a bootloader. If it's the only thing on there, then it'll just skip over the bootloader altogether. So we'll enter our password here and we'll just very quickly run through this. We don't need to read any of this stuff because this is the same stuff that's always there. We'll open a terminal LSBLK and we'll see here now that our VDA drive has been split into four different ones. We have our swap partition, our root partition and our home partition. That is how you manually partition Ubuntu. Now let's go ahead and move on to a distribution that uses the Calamari's installer. OK, so this is the Calamari's installer and this particular installer happens to be for zero Linux, the KDE version. And it really doesn't matter what distribution you're using that happens to use the Calamari's installer. They're all pretty much the same in design. Now some of them will have extra pages whether or not they're going to have you choose some specific software, whatever. That's not really what we're here for today. What we're going to end up doing is getting to this partitions part, which we'll do really quick here. And then I'll show you again how to partition manually so you have a separate home partition. So I'm going to run through this real quick. OK, so this is the page that you're going to want to know about if you're going to do this. So again, make sure you're choosing the right disk. In this case, you're actually going to get a little bit more information than you will with the Ubuntu stuff. So it's going to tell you that in this case, we're using BIOS. So you're not going to need to do the UEFI stuff if it shows you're using BIOS here. It also gives you a dropdown for the disks that are in your system, whether you have more than one disk or not. So in the Ubuntu one, it will only show you a dropdown for that if you have multiple disks. In this case, it will show that dropdown whether you have more disks or not. In this case, we still only have the one, so it selects that automatically. So again, for the most people, you're just going to hit this erase disk option. You can choose whether I had to swap what file system you want to use, whatever. In our case, we're going to do manual partitioning and then we're going to hit next. So again, this looks almost identical to what we did just did with Ubuntu. So the process is almost exactly the same. Again, it's going to ask you make sure you're choosing the right disk up here at the top. We're going to hit new partition table and here's something that's a little bit different. So in this case, I'm going to choose MBR. So that's just because I am using BIOS MBR is the appropriate type of partition we want to create. If you're using UEFI, you have to choose GUID. In this case, it's called GPT and you'll want to just choose that because that's what you'll have to do if you are on UEFI. Now, in the Ubuntu section, I'm not sure if it does that for you automatically or not. I can't honestly tell you I think that it does. But again, there may be an option for when you're actually on a UEFI system for you to choose that. Unfortunately, it doesn't show you that unless you're actually on a UEFI system. So in this case, we're just going to choose MBR. If you're using UEFI, you would choose GPT. So we're going to OK. We're going to select free space. We're going to hit instead of a plus in this situation, we're just going to hit create. So we're going to choose now to create that BIOS section. So we're going to choose the BIOS grub thing right here. And again, I'm going to make it four megabytes, five, I guess, because I hit five. It's fine. And in this case, we're going to want to make sure that thing is EXT4. So we're just going to make sure that it's EXT4. I'm not sure what Butterfest would actually do. So we're just going to make sure it's EXT4. And then we're going to want to hit OK. Now we're going to want to choose the free space again, hit create. And we're going to want to create a 2048 megabyte swap section. So we're just going to 2048 megabytes. In this case, we're going to choose Linux swap as the file system. And we're going to want to make sure that this is flagged as swap. So we'll check this down here. And OK. And then we're going to want to hit free space again, hit create. And in this case, we're going to want to make a 10,000 megabyte partition. And this is going to be our root partition. And again, I'm going to choose EXT4 just to be consistent. So we'll hit this. We're going to want to then choose the mount point, which is going to be brute. OK. And we're going to want to flag that as root down here at the bottom. Hit check. And OK. And then the next thing we want to do is create our home partition. So we'll select free space again. Hit create. We're going to leave that. The rest of the space goes to the home partition. We're going to again select EXT4. We're going to choose the mount point of home in this case. And we're going to scroll down here. I don't think we actually have to choose anything from here in terms of flags. I think that that just stays as home. So that's going to be perfectly fine for now. So we're going to go ahead and hit OK. And then we're done. So we're going to make sure that the master boot record in this case, because we're using legacy BIOS is on the appropriate thing. So slash dev slash SDA slamed the same thing as on Ubuntu. We're going to hit next. And it's going to tell you again, it's basically the same warning that Ubuntu gives you that a GPT partition table is best for most systems. I'm using master boot record. You can choose GPT for either legacy BIOS or UFI. If you just want to do that, it works exactly the same. You're only forced to use GPT if you are on UFI. So we're going to go ahead and hit OK. It should work just fine. We're going to enter credentials here. This is all fine. We're going to enter that very strong password again. And we're going to hit next. And we're going to hit install. And we're going to hit install now. OK, now that that's done, we're going to go ahead again and hit the restart button here. And we'll see if it worked. Hopefully it did. And we have grubs. So it looks like it's probably going to work just fine. Which is good. Always makes me relieved when we get 45 minutes into a video. Granted that was record time. And it actually worked because I only tested it on Ubuntu. So I want to make sure we're actually there. So we have a fully installed system. I'm not going to. We're just going to ignore that. We'll wait for Katie to actually start up here. We'll open up a terminal here and you can. We'll do LSBLK again. If that goes away, get out of the way. LSBLK. There we go. And we can see again. We have a four part drive, just like we did in Ubuntu. We have the swap. We have the root. And we have the home. So that is how you use the partition manager on a Calamari's based installer. Now, let's just say you're installing a distribution that doesn't use either of these installers. There's a good chance of it. So what would you do? Well, the answer to that is that for the most part, the process is going to be exactly the same. The only things that are going to change is what the UI of the partition manager actually looks like. So if you're using something like Fedora that has its own partition manager, you would do it through there. Again, it's just going to look a little bit different. The process should remain exactly the same. The only place where you're going to have problems is if you're installing something that doesn't use a GUI installer. So if you're installing something like Gentoo, you're installing something like Arch, you're installing something like Slackware, perhaps something that doesn't have a GUI actual GUI installer, then it's going to be a little different. So if you're going to be, you're probably going to use something like fdisk or CF disk or something like that. The ideas are still going to be the same. You're still going to want to create those partitions that you need to create, whether you're using UEFI or legacy BIOS, and you'll just need to do it in a different place. So in that case, you're going to be, again, using something that is terminal based in order to do the partition manager. It's going to work a little bit differently, but the concept is at least exactly the same. So that is it for this video. It was a long one, so I hope you enjoyed it. If you have questions, you can leave those in the comment section below. I will try to answer them now. You probably noticed that I'm not as familiar with UEFI as they probably should be. I know that that is going the way of the dodo, and I need to, you know, buck up on that information, and I plan on doing that. But so far, for the most part, I just have always used legacy BIOS. So my knowledge isn't as deep when it comes to UEFI. I've tried, I've hope I've explained those things as well as I possibly can. If you have questions, leave them in the comment section below. If I can't answer it, someone else probably will be able to answer it. So just leave those down there. If you liked this video, make sure you hit the subscribe button. I do these kind of things every once in a while where I just sit down and do a really good tutorial or what I hope to be a really good tutorial. So if you don't want to miss that, hit the subscribe button. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.