Adivce on Partitions

[Thiers Botelho]

On 6/1/06, Andy Anderson <opus at slowlanecafe.com> wrote:

[snip]

> . . . I'll share my approach.

And I'll ask a few more questions if you don't mind . . .

>
> 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,  . . .

You didn' say so but I understood that you've got a triple-boot setup
(Windoze + Breezy + Dapper). That approaches what I wish myself, so if
you don't mind please clarify a bit more :

One single /boot for both Ubuntu's ?

And how to you deal with GRUB on this setup ? (two installs or just one ?)

> . . . 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.

Do you cook this up during install or do it afterwards ? Quite clever
! I was previously thinking of 2 /home's (just as you do for / and
/var), but your branching approach seems cleaner and also much better
backup-wise.

>
> 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.

Perfect, you've almost read my mind . . .    :))

> 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.

I like this idea too. And on a side note, I´d have an additional NTFS
partition just for pagefile.sys - this way you reduce fragmentation on
Windoze´s C:\ drive.

On the size of swap partition - "never more than 1536 Mb" comes from
some specification or system limit ? What about a system with 1 or 2
Gb RAM ?

> And yes, I give a lot of space to /boot, but I keep all of
> the old kernel images around - just in case.

Are the kernels for both Ubuntu's kept together ?

And I suppose GRUB's files for both Ubuntu's live here also . . .

[snip]

> Andy Anderson

Cheers

Thiers