Paritions to install Ubuntu

[Eamonn Sullivan]

On 9/27/06, Colin Kern <razael1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm about to do a new install of Ubuntu (I just posted a few minutes
> ago about 64-bit processors), and I wanted to ask about paritioning
> the hard drive.  Whenever I look at a guide to installing Linux, it
> always recommends different partitions for /, /home, and sometimes
> others.  They never seem to suggest the size of these partitions,
> though.  It seems like partitioning like this would waste disk space,
> since you don't know exactly how much space you are going to use for
> installed programs as opposed to documents, mp3s, etc.  As a result,
> I've always just made a swap partition and then put everything under a
> giant partition.  What do other people do?  Is it really worth having
> a complicated partitioning scheme?

I know a lot of people get very into this subject, debating the
relative sizes of /boot, /, /home, /var, and /tmp, but personally, I
only worry about that on a server. On a laptop, assuming you back up
your data somehow on a regular basis, I'd just do what you normally
do: swap, plus one big /. The advantage of a separate /home directory
isn't that great, in my opinion, on a laptop, where you aren't likely
to be trying out new distributions, etc. But that's just me.

-Eamonn