/home partition will give you a partition set aside for each individual user's private files and configuration files and means that provided you don't do anything silly like formatting them when updating your system the /home directory will be left alone, and you will find all your own settings will be left there for you to begin again with each new install. It is not essential to have a /home partition it can be part of the / in which case it is going to be overwritten with each fesh new install. So it's a matter of personal taste . I personnally don't bother as whatever I need to keep, I back up, off harddrive, and it's only a few minutes work to put them back. That way I pretty well start again each time. But I all so have many spare partition inwhich I store things that matter to me and I can always keep personal stuff there but again they may not be secure , however in my case that is not important to me as I only have myself as a user. I think if my computer was for many users use then I would adopt a /home partition just so that if I had to restore an OS that had been damaged I would have everyone's configuration set up on reboot.
Another important partition is,
/boot Again it's not esential , but I have more than one linux OS and I find it quick and simple to have a /boot partition of a few hundred MB so that each individual OS installer puts the boot files in that one place, it makes dual linux booting that much more convenient and simple to accomplish if all the OS boot files go in one place for all the different linux OS's. when I upgrade a Linux OS I delete the old OS boot files from that /boot partition and the new installer puts the new boot files in there for me.automatically. In addition , when I'm in the installers's lilo install , creating the new boot scripts, the installer detects all the other boot files pertaining to the other linux OS's and helps you configure a stanza to boot them. If I didn't have a /boot partition this would not happen, and I am forced to do everything from decktop of the new linux OS, where it would be necessary to copy the old linux OS boot files across to the new linux OS's /boot directory.It achieves the same result but not so conveniently.
There are more but that is enogh for now.
John
Weston R wrote:
What are the advantages of having something other than just / and swap?
For example... /, /home, and swap
I use my computer as a desktop system only and have used a few different distrobutions before but am currently installing mandrake 9.2
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John Richard Smith
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