What I do for a new machine?

[Liam Proven]

On 7 December 2011 16:52, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 16:29, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You don't need /boot any more. It was useful about a decade or more
>> ago when many BIOSes had limitations such as being unable to boot from
>> cylinders on the hard disk numbered above 1024, or were unable to boot
>> from sections above a certain size limit - at various times, there
>> were limitations above 32MB, 512MB, 8GB, 32GB and 120GB.
>>
>> Now, don't worry about it.
>>
>> You need / and swap. Having /home as well is useful.
>>
>> For / - depending on the size of your disk - 16GB is generous and 32GB
>> is massive. For swap, use 2× the amount of physical RAM, as a
>> guideline. That is very generous. All the rest of the space you can
>> give to /home.
>>
>
> Hi Liam! If we are getting rid of outdated practices, such as a
> separate /boot partition, then another practice that should go is to
> double the RAM for the swap partition. Enough SWAP to hold the RAM for
> hibernate/sleep is enough. I can think of no case in which someone
> will be swapping GiBs! At that point it will take so long to read the
> swap that the machine will be useless anyway.
>
> I would love to hear counter opinions. Has anyone ever (desktop /
> server) ever swapped over 2 GiB?

Shalom!

Well, OK, yes, I am sure that this is true. But, OTOH, it is an easy,
safe guideline, very easy to remember and to work out, and disk space
is very cheap these days. A gig or two here or there is nothing when
terabyte hard disks are becoming common.

I suppose the only time you would ever need even as much as 1.5×
physical RAM now on a modern PC is if you hibernated a machine which
was swapping very heavily.

But then, not everyone is running a modern machine. I have installed
Ubuntu (well, Lubuntu) onto 2 or 3 machines with 256MB RAM in the last
year or 2 and several with 512MB.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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