Gnome Partition Tool or Gparted

First thing first.

I cannot provide a public server.
Instead, I use blog pieces through Google.

Google owns it and I have no ownership.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook or any other platform there is no censorship and I do not publish BS anyway.

I have a private server called AsokaPlus and it has no domain name.

To get a domain I need to pay a hefty monthly FEE to the local or foreign service provider.

When it began it was all free and one needed only an email to register and Gmail was non existent.
 

I started with Yahoo and it is my oldest email and it is all free and no censorship.

The internet had become a cesspit and how much filth is poured against President Putin and Russians unlike British and American media who live on faecal matter or filth.

Russia if one cares to visit one of the cleanest country on this planet.
 

Gparted of Gnome

It all started with a PC and FAT partition of Microsoft Windows.

DOS was the forerunner.

FAT 16 and 32  (sadly no 64) had the total market share except for Apple hardware and software. One still need to have at least one (1) MB start up partition to boot.

It changed to Microsoft Linux killer UEFI and now we have a solution called 500MB odd EFI partition to boot independent of Windows. Lot of politics involved and money exchanged. I do not want to be a part of it in my full retirement.

I am an avid user of G.P.T or Gnome Partition Tool.

My first book on Linux is how to partition a hard disk and dual boot with Windows XP. I started with 2GB hard disk with Windows with C, D and E partitions.

I have not used Windows for over 20 years and what little little I remember is, that I used Partition Magic tool installed in Windows to delete E partition and install Linux having partitioned with ext3.

There was a limitation of 15 partitions.

Only 4 primary partitions were allowed and 11 others were logical partitions on the last extended partition.

3 primary partitions and one extended in total.

I have to invariably use swap partition of twice the size of the RAM.

Swap rolls over the memory pages that cannot be accommodated by RAM in one sitting. Windows have not figured out a solution and they now depend on the cloud and with Elon Musk taken out of context by President Putin, the Cloud Solutions are not going to be viable and tricky for every American, British and Ukrainian citizen.

So I am left with 10 partitions and I would mount instances Mandrake, Suse and Redhat on those 10 partitions. Mandrake is no more and Mageia coming from France failed to live up to an average Linux user.

I gradually moved to Debian and never used Ubuntu but I am now liberal with Ubuntu and it's follower Mint.

Basically, whatever the Linux distribution I use, I have a disk Partition Tool of my own choise to partition the disk and later finalise the GRUB boot loader, on a Efi partition. I believe, unlike MBR or Master Boot Record, Efi can sit anywhere on the disk but I have never tried it, other than the first partition.

Earlier boot loader was LiLo.

Nobody uses LiLo (? Linux loader) because of the robust GRUB.

Coming back to GPT, the new partition tool has gone beyond 15 partition limitation and my slave disk had 41 partitions. Problem with lot of partitions is,        it takes ages for GPT to read them.

Mind you partitions are written in ones and zeros and it takes a along time read and write.

Avoid resizing partition since it takes a long time.

I have decided to keep my partition table under 25 and I have Debian 11, Debian 12.1..., Ubuntu, Mint, and Emmabantus Installed at various times. Currently three (3) Debian installations are one of Ubuntu on 5GB partition have been my choice. I have fallen out of Emmabanuts and Mint, since, they cannot configure GRUB to Multiboot

I have Partition Magic CD which has gone commercial and it boots to RAM and CD is ejected.

It has many utilities including Gparted.

Gparted is from Debian.

It takes a little time to learn using GPT and         I really like rewriting the partition table which voids everything without the need for erasing with 1s and 0s.

I have the habit of erasing my USBs using Debian disk partition tool. Debian's partition tool is limited in configuring the partitions but it is very good at erasing, evrything in the USB but tales a long time to do that, as I said before.

Never try to erase a big hard disk it might take half a day or more. So one must sit down and write down the needs and the number of partitions, on a piece of paper.

One can have up to 9 partitions for a Linux distribution install but I am happy with 5, /boot, /root, /home, /var and /tmp.

By the way one can mount Linux in one partition and that is the strategy Ubuntu uses.

So four distributions installed  means 20 partitions, in total for me.

There are several partition types.

I love journalized ext4.

I hate btrfs because of its redundancy.

Reifs is used by Knoppix.

Xfs by BDS and Endless Os.

Xfs does not allowed resizing and takes over the hard disk.

I really like the ufs file system.

I use different types, so that when I glance, the table written on a paper I know which distribution is in which type of partitions.

I love organization Linux since I am a well organized man all my life. I follow the Japanese 5S principle and get it right first time round is my moto.

One does not need to repeat boring protocols.

I am going to, my book writing mode and none will be digital (this guy called Indian Gupta who steal or plagiarize copyright material as his own).