Ylan Segal wrote:
> My current thinking is that I want to create one partition for /home,
> one partition for my music files (/media ?), an appropriate swap
> partition and the rest of the drive as /.
>
> Questions:
> - Is my partitioning scheme rational? I just want to be able to
> reinstall the system in the future without that much hassle.
Other than that I *think* /media is a standard Ubuntu directory, your
scheme sounds rational to me. However, since you mention that a low
hassle reinstall is one of your goals, I'll share my approach.
Given sufficient disk space, here is how I partition my systems (yes,
I keep WinXP around for when I want to use it):
/dev/hda1 20 Gb ntfs /WinXP
/dev/hda2 30 Gb fat32 /Common
/dev/hda3 2 Gb ext3 /boot
/dev/hda4 rest of drive in extended partition
/dev/hda5 8 Gb ext3 /
/dev/hda6 4 Gb ext3 /var
/dev/hda7 8 Gb ext3 alternate / for later
/dev/hda8 4 Gb ext3 alternate /var for later
/dev/hda9 n Mb swap n=2*ram, but never more than 1536 Mb
/dev/hda10 m Gb ext3 /home, where m=rest of the disk
Note that /home is shared between the two Ubuntu's, but with
subdirectories for each release, such as /home/ubuntu510 for
Breezy and /home/ubuntu606 for Dapper user home directories.
This takes a little extra effort, but not much.
The alternate / and /var are used for the "next" release. So
now that Dapper is available, I have / and /var partitions
waiting for it to be installed, but it won't disturb my
Breezy system, so I don't have to be in a hurry to make
everything work today. Also, if any of the stuff that I
use doesn't work with Dapper, I can boot into Breezy when
I need to. Once I've made the move to Dapper and I'm no
longer using the Breezy install, I'll reformat the current
/ and /var so they'll be ready for Ubuntu 6.10.
I always have a /var partition separate from / in case something
goes wild and the log files start to grow out of control. I
guess this is a holdover from my early FreeBSD days (FreeBSD 3.x)
when I had this happen a couple of times.
I put the swap partition physically between / and /home so that
it is, on average, likely to be near where the drive's heads
are at any random time. It may not noticeably improve performance,
but I do it anyway.
And yes, I give a lot of space to /boot, but I keep all of
the old kernel images around - just in case.
> - How do I partition the drive? I understand that during the
> installation I will get the option to create manual partitions (/home
> and /media in this case). Can the rest of the partitions by created
> automatically by the installer?
Can't answer this since I haven't even downloaded Dapper yet...
> - Is /media and appropriate place to store music files? Is there a more
> "standard" place?
I'd probably use /music.
Hope this helps.
--
Andy Anderson
Salisbury, MD, USA
http://www.slowlanecafe.com
Priorities: my God, my wife, my world, my life. In that order.
- me
"A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour."
- Anonymous