RE: [TCLUG:1804] Reinstalling -- How should I partition?

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> Right now, /dev/hda is a 1.2 GB drive, and /dev/hdb is about 2 GB..  I
> was thinking of putting /home and /usr/src into ~500 MB partitions on
> hda, then possibly add a ~100 MB swap.  However, I don't really know how
> I should set up hdb..
>
> Basically, I'd like to know how big some partitions should be..  I know
> that / can be fairly small, if you put /usr on another partition..
> Should /usr/local be a different partition?  /usr/games?
>

	Everybody has a different opinion on this one, I'm sure.  Here's a few of
mine:

	Put your swap partition on hdb -- since it's used less than the root
partition, this'll speed up swap time a little.  100MB sounds excessive to
me...  I personally refuse to allocate more than 64MB of swap space, for
obscure religious reasons.

	a /home partition should be almost the same size as /usr, so you have
plenty of room to work on and store graphics files, C programs, whatever.  I
also serve web documents and samba files out of /home/httpd and /home/samba.
(If you intend to do a *lot* of filesharing, a /samba partition is a good
idea.)

	If you know absolutely and for sure that this machine is going to spend
most of its time fulfilling one specific duty -- say, being a Quake server
or Gimp workstation, than a seperate /usr/games or /usr/local partition
might make sense -- if it allows you to spread the /usr hierarchy across
several drives.  Generally, I prefer to err on the side of simplicity and
just give /usr a huge, sprawling partition.  My understanding is that the
ext2 filesystem is pretty efficient even on partitions >1GB (unlike FAT).

	So, in short, I'd either go with something kind of like:

	/dev/hda1	/		120M
	/dev/hda2	/home		800M+
	/dev/hda3	/usr/src	200M
	/dev/hdb1	/usr		1.5GB+
	/dev/hdb2	/whatever	400M
	/dev/hdb2	(swap)	64M

or, for minimum hassle and maximum flexibility

	/dev/hda1	/		120M
	/dev/hda2	/home		1.08G+
	/dev/hdb1	/usr		1.94G+
	/dev/hdb2	(swap)	64M