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I officially became a Linux user about 30 minutes ago when I successfully managed to install Linux Mint on my old, crashed, Dell Vostro V131.

I have the technical skills of a cucumber so please use short words and long descriptions when trying to answer this...

I have a Dell Vostro V131 with Intel i5 chip, 1st gen I believe. Windows 7 crashed irreparably and instead of rebooting with Windows I thought I would give this Linux thing a crack! I have successfully installed Linux Mint (Yay me!) But I also want to install Ubuntu to see which I like the feel of most. I would then like an additional drive to store all of my data that is available to both partitions. Is this needed? But, I'm confused! Why does Mint require so many different partitions? I have hoping to take my 1TB HDD and partition it into three virtual drives, have Mint on one, Ubuntu on another and all of my data on a third. I couldn't understand the partitioning though, can anyone help

Zanna
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jlt199
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When you reach the partitioning procedure, choose "Something else". All you need is a ext4 partition with / mount point (that's where the system will be installed) and a swap partition (the swap size must be between the size of your RAM and twice that size, but you would probably already have one from the mint installation so you don't need a 2nd). Some prefer to create also a separate /home partition but it's not necessary. See some more info here: How to use manual partitioning during installation?

You can also share the same /home partition between mint and ubuntu but it's not a good idea because applications store their settings there and different versions on different distros can cause problems. So if you want a data partition, just create another partition (without any mount point) or leave an empty space and after the installation use gparted or Disks (gnome-disk-utility) to create a partition of your empty space (you can also make it to be mounted at startup).

Community
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Thanos Apostolou
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