As we've started to see already, this type of question can ignore
mini-holy-wars, as everyone has their preferred way to partition. For me,
/home is almost always separate because I like to jump from one distro to
another from time to time. When dual-booting, as long as the kernels are
similar, I've shared the /usr partition so I didn't have multiple
installations of a bunch of larger software packages. And of course /home
so I don't have files scattered both across several PCs and several OS
installations.

I've also created a FAT32 "swap" partition on Windows/Linux dual-boot PCs
to make transferring files simpler. (I haven't tackled rw ntfs yet...it
looks like it should work to me, but I'm assuming it wasn't compiled into
the Knoppix kernel I'm using.) As an alternative to this, I've recently
found rfstool, which lets you read files from ReiserFS in Windows.

Anyway, the partition and swap partition scheme you use really depends on
what you're doing with the machine, in the end. Highly multi-user? I'd put
/usr, /home, /tmp, and /var all on separate partitions to avoid one of
these filling the entire drive (or drives.) I would also have /home on a
separate drive, if possible, than /.

A system for testing (like mine usually are)? /home is separate, possibly
/usr, and one to three different /'s.

For my system at home that basically sits as my own server, /home is on a
separate drive, along with swap.

But most of this is my own stabbing in the dark at what I think it should
all look like. At least when it's broken apart, I can move or resize
partitions quicker than using bootable linux disks, plus I can do it on
the fly. I don't know that you can do that if everything is on the root
partition.


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