From: "Adam W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I have always wondered why the default installation of mandrake or other > distro's, partitions your drive into all these different partitions, if > you choose the auto allocate feature. > > For example, different partitions for /home and /var and / > > I have always just used the one partition for everything - at what stage > does the partitioning of the drive start to matter?? > Assuming we install everything using default areas, within Linux file trees application and utility programs are installed in /usr/local; admin files are in /etc/; and databases and logs are in /var. Individual user files are in /home. Indeed, the sub-trees that change most are /home, /var/, /usr/local, and /etc. So, in re-installing or upgrading we save /home, /var and /etc/. For /usr/local we re-install application software and utility tools after re-installing OS. Re-install or upgrade overwrites our above partitions except /home if we choose to. So, it will save us time if we manage our partitioning so that we do not have to re-install application software and rebuild databases when we re-install or upgrade OS.
In my case because I do not wish to lose time and effort whenever I re-install or upgrade, I always have one or two '/appl1', '/appl2', etc. In this way too, I have structured data storages and avoid losing info. Partitioning matters (1) when you acquire software and generate data on your disk that you wish to retain for sometime in the future; (2) when you install Linux as a workstation as against installing it as a server; (3) when you install more than one disk drive on your server; and (4) for other reasons, like using raid partitions. The most common dilemma confronting partitioning decisions is dealing with (1), (2), and (3) above for small users or organisation. For large organisations issues dealing with some or all of them is always a challenge. Whether your organisation is large or small the objective is to partition so that you save plenty of hassles for yourself whenever you need to upgrade your OS or software. You are also partitioning so you do not run out of space for a period in the future say like one year for a workstation and two years for a server. The workstation and server disk requirements vary. The numbers are of course arbitrary depending on your resources and requirements. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
