> The way I look at it, if I run out of space somewhere and have more space on > another partition, I'm screwed, right? So, isn't it better to have one big
It's certainly inconvenient when that happens, but as long as you have enough space spmeplace else - enough to hold the image of whatever you need to transplant, that way you don't have to stuff it somewhere external like tape or CD-RW. It's not a good idea to have everything in one massive partition because often if one segment fills up (/var for instance) it can hose your system. Even putting /var on a separate partition can hose things if /var fills up, though. It's easier to recover from if it's separated out, I think. Over here, I have two drives, and I've hosted /var and /var/spool on the same drive -- then I found that my /var was filing up, and I had to do some moving things around, end opted to have /var all by itself on the old drive, and /var/spool on its own partition (I pull news down, and that generates copious amounts of data in /var). Having a separated out /home is a very good idea so you don't have to lose your data between upgrades. Other partitions can be kept as part of / : it really depends on what you are going to use them for. Back in the older days wehn most had smaller drives, it was easy for the novice to underestimate how much space would be required, and that is still a strong argument for not having multiple partitions - at least until you can guage your disk usage for a while. But nowadays with larger drives - typically 30 gigs on up - making a 30 gig / partition is hardly the right approach. For what it's worth over here, my main Linux is on about 11 gigs of what was left over after I figured what I'd want for everything else, like 5 gigs for /home, 5 gigs for /usr/local, 5 gigs for spool, etc. The way I'm going, I'm probably going to run close to running out of room on /home, and realistically (tm of Radio Shack) ;) that was a poor choice on my part - 11 gigs is way more than enough for the OS / applications portion. (That's one reason I just folded /opt in rather than having it as a separate partition).
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