On 8 Jun 2005 12:05:38 -0700 "prash" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> hello, > i have a spanking new machine with a 40 gb hard disk - all for my > favorite distro! of course too much space is a bad thing too > (especially when you don't know how to allocate it). > i have decided on this scheme to begin with: > / : 7.0 gb > swap : 1.5 gb (i have 512mb ram) > /usr : 4.0 gb > /usr/local : 18.0 gb (i WILL install anything/everything out > there) Most stuff (unless you're planning on compiling up a lot of stuff that's not in repositories) will install in /usr, thus I suggest you may be wasting space here. > /home : 4.0 gb > /home/prash : 4.0 gb (i am ego(t)istic that way) Why the split? If 'prash' needs more space he will be crying and running back /home ;). Better to just have one partition here, you can still have a separate dir for 'prash', of course. > /boot : 0.5 gb (is this enough?) > /var : 1.0 gb (is this enough? this is NOT a mail/news > server) Personally I don't see the need for a separate boot partition. But it seems adequate. /var is probably safe, although a huge upgrade could eat up 300-400 megabytes for apt cache files - and they go into /var. > 1. why should i (and how can i) define a /tmp partition when i don't > know what temporary space each app might take? a dvd burner might Most people either overcommit or undercommit quite a bit, especially if they don't have a good idea of what space it can take up. It may be preferable to keep /tmp as part of /. Maybe if you give / 10 gb, and release some of the space taken up by /usr/local. I'm currently running on a 30 gig drive, and some of my initial partition settings seem to be not enough -- for instance, I gave 5 gb each to /, /home, /usr/local, and then much of the rest is (currently) unused -- it used to be my / for Mandrake, but I now have it mounted at /mnt and use /mnt/tmp as my 'big' repository for such things as huge dvd rips and such -- that stuff won't fit anyway in /home. Today, if I were going to do a wipe & reinstall, I'd give more space to / and to / home, and likely get rid of /usr/local. In the beginning I also had 'opt' but quickly found that there was little software I was really going to install. > 2. suppose i reduce the partition sizes of some of the folders above > and keep aside, let's say, 5gb of "unpartitioned/empty/unused" space. I think you can (qparted) but I haven't tried it, and I'm not even sure if you can add to (for instance) /home if the unused space is at the end of the drive, and oher partitions are physically between the partition you want to expand, and the free space 'pool'. And I'm a little skittish about trying that without having a verifiable backup done first. I have moved things around with tar | tar type 'backups' before, as my needs changed, then reusing the partitions as something else. And that's a doable method, as long as you have enough space somewhere to hold a tar (or tar.gz) of the partition. > -prash. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David E. Fox Thanks for letting me [EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
