[ubuntu-uk] Partitioning Questions

[Neil Greenwood]

On 12/05/07, I C McNab <icmcnab at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Alec Wright wrote:
> > I recommend 15-20GB for / (my / is 15GB on a 250GB), 1-3GB for swap
> > (just to be safe... i have 3GB on my 250GB) and make the rest /home
> >
> > But 20GB and 3GB are a bit excessive; you could easily get away with
> > 10GB and 1GB (or even less!)
> >
> > Heres my partition table in case you're interested, I'm dual booting
> > with windows:
>
>
> Alec >>> Thanks for your very helpful reply, and for sight of your
> partition table.
>
>     I'm going to run Ubuntu and WinXP on separate drives (500Gb and
> 160Gb respectively).  So there's no problem about allocating 20Gb to /.
>   I just wanted to be confident that there was enough space to install
> packages - enough for /usr to increase and for whatever space apt needs
> to keep track of packages.  And as I'm new to all this I had no idea
> what ball-park figures for a home system might look like.
>
>    So your suggestion of 20Gb is a very useful guide for someone who has
> no idea roughly 'how long a piece of string' would need to be to do the job.
>
> Many thanks
> --
> Ian

Hi Ian,

One thing you could look at is using LVM, which can resize the
partitions later. It's probably not the best thing to try if you're
new to Linux, especially to use for the / partition.

The other thing you can do is leave some empty space at the moment, in
case you guess wrong. You can always move a directory tree (such as
/usr) to another partition - it's quite easy when using a Live CD, but
you can do it when the partitions are mounted (but it takes some
fiddling) - if you want to do the latter, I can dig out a link that
explains what to do step-by-step.

HTH
Hwyl,
Neil.