Advance-topics/ubiquity-partitioning

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A disk partition in simple terms means a "slice" of your HDD/SSD. Partitioning allow you to split up your SSD  into multiple sections. For more information about partitions, refer to this excellent wikipedia article.

Partitioning

This section will describe how to partition your main OS media from within Ubiquity installer.Partitioning is a process that will remove all the files on the areas you're working on. Please make sure all the information data are already copied to a safe location (i.e. backed up) before you continue with partitioning. In this section we will simply wipe everything on the SSD and create a single primary partition for installing Snakeoil. You can adapt this howto to do other things, e.g. split the SSD into two partitions - one for installing the OS, and the other for music.

A Clean Slate

First step is to start with a clean slate. Select a partition to delete, e.g. /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc) and click the button with the '-' label to remove.

Delete partitions

Removed all listed partitions, the screen will change to this:

Clean slate

Once you see 100% free space you can start creating the partition for the Snakeoil installation (Don't worry about losing your data at this stage because these changes havn't been applied yet).

People who intend to install Snakeoil OS in a multi OS setup, hit the 'revert' button to reload the existing partition information, and then start editing.

Creating Partitions

Click on the "free space" line and then click the first button to create your Snakeoil partition.

Create partition

We are using the entire SSD for your Snakeoil partition, so click the "+" button on the size until it maxes out. If you want to create a music partition, leave at least 8 GB for root partition(Increase this if you have a very big music collection as the databases could be big).

It is important to keep the file system as EXT4 as other file system types will not work.

Create partition 2

Leave the partition as "Primary", and "beginning of this space". Click on the "Mount Point" drop down box and select "/".

Create partition 3

And there you have it, you have a partition with a EXT4 file system that will be mounted as the root mount point.

Create partition 4

Click on the "OK" button and you should see that /dev/sda1 now takes 100% of the drive (Make sure the line chart at the top takes up 100% of the space). Tick the"Format" box for the installer to format the file system before the installation (recommended).

Partition created

Unlike the defaults we did not create a swap area here. Snakeoil is very lightweight and it's only function is to play audio (and do it well). As such the memory foot print is very low. Swap area will just waste the space.

You can follow the same steps above to create additional partitions for music, or even a swap area if you're using very little RAM.

Multi Partition Example

Here is an example where you can split your HDD into two partitions - one for the system, and the other for music. The advantage of doing this is you do no loose your music if you re-install SnakeoilOS, like so:

Multi partitions

Note the above picture is when you first create the partitions. On re-install, make sure you un-check the "Format" box for /media/music line.

Make sure you do a back up of your playlists as they will be wiped out on a re-install.

Click on the "Install Now" button to continue.

Continue With Installation

No swap space warning

At this stage you are still defining what the partitions should look like, the changes have not been applied to the partition (i.e. original contents of the SSD is still intact).  The following warning would show up if you did not create the Swap Area.Just click "continue". This next screen will apply all the changes you had made to the partition table. At this stage you have only configured how the partitions should be, the changes are not applied (i.e. the original contents of your SSD is still intact). Once you hit the "continue" button the changes will be applied and installation will continue.

Write changes

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