[ubuntu-uk] killed box through /var :P

[Liam Proven]

2008/12/23 Farran Lee <fazzy.baboon at ntlworld.com>:

> cheers, I've done it all now and it worked. Everythng was fine in the clean
> 8.04.1. But as soon as I upgraded to 8.10, compiz won't work again, and I
> think there's other issues I haven't discovered yet

I'm impressed it still works at all after that!

My advice would be to  nuke what you've just done and start again.
Stay with the 8.04 LTS edition - upgrading every 6mth is a pain in the
butt. Have a 2nd installation with the latest edition in it if you
want to play around and see what's new. If and when it gets to the
point that you really need some of the new stuff, *then* wipe &
reinstall with that version - but there will probably be a new LTS
release about every couple of years.

You clearly have a big disk - you said you were leaving a quarter of a
terabyte for /home. This being so, you are being *way* too stingy on
the other partitions.

You said:

> 30gb at /, 15gb at /media/Work, 3gb at /root, 253gb at /home and 8gb swap

Junk the /media/Work partition. All you need is root, home and swap.

You said you like installing new software. Software is big, often
bigger than data. I'd suggest that what you do is:
 - take the total disk size (309GB? I don't know if you have other OSs
on there. I'll assume not.)
 - mentally set aside 4G or 8G for swap (so there's about 301G left.)
 - mentally, split the remaining space 50:50 (to the nearest gig)
between root and home.

Now, partition it thus:

 - 1 primary partition, ext3, 150GB (or whatever half the free space is) as /
 - 1 extended partition of all the rest of the space
in the extended partition:
 - 1 logical partition of 151GB (or whatever the other half is) as /home
 - another logical paritition, from there to the end of the disk, as swap

That way, you've got masses of space for programs.

If you later need to adjust it, boot from your Ubuntu live desktop CD
and use the Partition Editor. Don't try moving system folders around
by hand - it's too risky!

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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