I am installing Rocky Linux 9 on a laptop (dualboot with Windows 11, EFI secure boot in use).
By default RL9 seems to create a separate swap, / and /home partitions/mount points, but due to having only limited hard drive space for this installation, I’d like to use all that space to / (/home would be in that same partition as /, and for swap I’d rather set up a swapfile in the root partition which is easier to move or resize in the future, if needed). Also for simplicity, no LVM is needed for this desktop use as I am not going to install any new hard drives and add them to existing logical volumes/mount points.
That way I don’t have to decide how much is enough for the different partitions, e.g. is 20 or 70GB enough for / (I think it suggested using 70GB for / in my case).
Is there some simple instructions how I should set up the mountpoints correctly in this case? Something like this maybe?
No LVM (IIRC the installer wants to use LVM by default, which I guess makes sense at least for server use)
/boot 1GB
/ the rest of the available space (XFS)
Am I missing something there?
My opinion since you don’t give us any idea what you are going to do with the RL9 install and is similar to what I do for test installs is the following.
After creating 70G of free space at the end of device with the windows disk manager I would create the following partitions with the blivet partitioning tool of the rocky install media:
64G / formatted as ext4
4G swap
1G /boot/efi formatted as fat32
If you do not use hibernation, I don’t, then you can forego creating the swap partition and shift that space to / . I always create a separate esp partition so as to reduce the chance of wiping the windows esp in the install.
The system will be used for generic desktop use for a single user (me).
I would basically want the default RL9 partitioning, but no separate swap or /home partitions/mount points. How would that look like if I have to do it manually from scratch, would it be e.g.
1G /boot/efi formatted as fat32
the rest / formatted as xfs
Or is something else needed for a functional RL9 installation (on a dual-boot system with Windows 11)?
Or then I guess I just create it with the default partitioning, and afterwards remove the separate swap and home partitions and recreate them into / filesystem, but I’d rather not do that as I foresee it could become quite complicated, e.g. expanding the / and recreating a new /home directory… At least I’d have to boot the system from e.g. a Linux liveCD so that the root filesystem is not mounted etc.?
Erm, ok, I forgot that RL9 uses LVM by default, so naturally there are no big issues expanding the root filesystem. It seems swap and /home are just on separate logical volumes, not on separate partitions. I guess that simplifies what I want to do.