Partition sizes and data

[David]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 07:39:50AM -0400, Gary Graham wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 18:40 -0400, amigian wrote:
> > Still a newbie here. A couple of questions regarding linux partitions.
> > 
> > First - Is the root partition for linux only and the Home partition for 
> > the install of programs and keeping of data? If i am incorrect in this, 
> > please inform me to as what is.
> > 
> > Second - Approximately what are good sizes (MB) for each of the partitions?
> > 
> > Thanks for the info.

I used to find this very confusing when I started. 

You only NEED one swap partition and one root partition, but you can have 
as many as you like (within limits of partitioning systems). There is no 
necessity to have a /home partition.

It used to be that the swap partition should be double the physical RAM, 
but I'm not sure this is still the case. It doesn't hurt anyway, and 
that's what I still do.

You must have a root partition (mount as /), but  you can dedicate any 
directory to any partition once you have set up swap and root. You can 
make them any size you want. I've just done a brand new install of Hoary 
and it seems to be less than 2 gig, so your / partition should be at least 
10 gig, to allow for all the other exciting things you are going to add 
later ;-)

The advantage of multiple partitions is supposed to be that you can 
reformat, update, change distro and do all weird stuff if you have 
different partitions for your /home directory without disturbing all your 
personal data (assuming you are sane and store such stuff in your home 
directory - database systems might put your data elsewhere than /home).

Personally, I rarely find it a good idea to have multiple partitions 
unless i'm multi booting (eg: winXX and Ubuntu). There have been a few 
occassions when I've run out of space on one partition while there's 
plenty of space on another. Although it's perfectly possible to get around 
this, if you are a beginner it's probably better not to have to worry
about it. There is no spectacular advantage to multiple partitions if you 
are doing a simple home/work desktop machine.

If I were you, I'd just have swap and root and leave it at that.

David.


> > -- 
> > Later.
> > Marc
> > 
> > http://www.marc-audette.us/
> > 
> > My Yahoo! Groups
> > IronLadies2	http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/ironladies2/
> > 
> 
> I have two 60G hard drives in my system.
> I go to manual partitioning, and set up the slave first.
> I put a 1G swap drive at the begining of the drive, then put a second
> partition for the rest of the drive as /home
> The master drive I just put as / and that is all.
> I have re-installed the operating system several times, and as long as I
> tell it not not format the /home partition, I do not lose any actual
> information.
> 
> This makes backing up easy, also.
> 
> Gary
> 
> 
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