[ubuntu-uk] Home partitions do I need one?

[Rob Beard]

Graham Smith wrote:
> Rob
>
>
>   
>> In theory unless something goes completely wrong you should be able to
>> upgrade online as each new release is made available but I'd say a
>> separate home partition is a good thing.
>>     
>
> Yes, I like the principle
>
>  > Having a separate home partition also means
>   
>> that you could format your root partition as ext4 for extra performance
>> and keep your home partition as ext3 if you wished.
>>     
>
> Or even NTFS I assume to make it easy for a dual boot Windows
>
>
>   
Well I wouldn't personally format my home partition to NTFS.  I can 
however access my Windows partition with the NTFS3g driver which is 
handy for those occasions when I need to access something off it (I 
rarely use Vista on my laptop, I don't think I've used it in 2 months or 
so).

What I would love (not sure if something is available) is a addon for 
Firefox so I can save my bookmarks to a central server (ideally my own 
personal server) and have it shared between my many PCs, at the moment I 
must have about 5 or 6 different sets of bookmarks.  Being able to 
access them from anywhere (like I can with my mail) would be handy.
>> I generally allocate about 20 to 40GB for root depending on the size of
>> the drive.  On my desktop I used to use 40GB (it was a 750GB drive) and
>> on my laptop with a 250GB drive I tend to allocate 20GB for root (mainly
>> because I also have Vista installed on it which I give about 60GB) but
>> really I think 15GB would probably be plenty.
>>     
>
> Thanks, useful to know.
>
>   
No problem, you can always resize the partitions using something like 
gparted if need be if you find you don't use as much space, or need more 
space.
>> As far as the swap partition goes (you'd have to create this manually
>> too if you do a manual partitioning), if you want to use Hibernate then
>> you'd need to allocate a partition at least (if not slightly larger to
>> be safe) to match the size of your system memory.  So for instance if
>> you have 2GB on your PC, allocate at least 2GB swap (or maybe something
>> like 2.2GB).  I found when I got to 4GB though that it was easier just
>> to shut the machine down and boot it up as it was quicker than
>> hibernate.  Now on my laptop with 4GB memory I have about a 600MB swap
>> partition.
>>     
>
> Thanks again, these sorts of decsions are always difficult to meake
> without some experience.
>
>   
Yep, I was thinking along the lines of my laptop has limited space and I 
can't really afford a bigger hard drive at the moment for it so I 
decided to go for a smaller swap and not use hibernate (which I have 
found is a bit hit and miss anyway for me anyway, I generally use 
suspend mode when I'm not using the laptop for short periods of time).

Rob