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Installing ubuntu do I really need a boot partition?

Installing ubuntu do I really need a boot partition?

I will be installing Ubuntu 9.10.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 286
Total answers/comments: 2
Guest [Entry]

"It's a choice. You might, or you might not. I typically do. Besides swap, I typically create 3 partitions:

/boot - typically 60MB or so. More for fedora, or if I plan to experiment / have several kernels installed
/ - 7 or 8 GB to hold everything else that's not /home
/home - the rest of my disk.

The main reason I split to out like this is to give me as many options as possible during recovery and backup situations. If things never go wrong, 1 big partition will work and you may never have to care.

Maybe I'm just old and paranoid ;-)

If you are concerned about security, after installation, you can set your boot partition to be read only. This prevents anyone (even you) from writing anything to your kernel. While fairly secure, it does mean that when those old Kernel updates show up in your update window, they will fail to install until you make your boot partition writable, reboot, then install them. I have done this on my daughters laptop, just as an added layer against anything tampering with her kernel - she can install software, but to mod her kernel, she has to ask me for help. It give me a chance to verify this is something that really should be installed to begin with."
Guest [Entry]

"There is no need to create a boot partition. Everything can go on one partition without causing any problems.

Even swap can be on the single partition (in the form of a swap file); swap files used to be somewhat slower than swap partitions, but as of Linux kernel 2.6, they have the same performance as a swap partition (also see the question swap partition vs file for performance? on serverfault.com).

Advice about creating multiple partitions has nothing to do with the BIOS finding them (which is bogus). It's about such things as sharing a single /home/yourname partition between multiple operating systems, and making certain types of backups easier. For most users a single partition is the easiest to set up and works fine."