I've managed to clear off a 20 gig partition so I can delete it and install debian linux, they say that to install everything you need 2gigs, in the linux.org beginner lessons the guy has four partitions for his copy of linux, one for swap 500megs, /(boot) 1.2gigs, /usr 3.5 gigs, and /home 5gigs, I was thinking of spliting up my 20 gig partition into 2 gigs for swap (since I have 1gig of ram), 3gigs for /(boot), 5gigs for /usr, and 10 gigs for /home, but I don't have any real basis for this setup so I want some input. also my hard drive is currently set up like this c:\ 20gig partition, windows and misc programs d:\ 20gig partition, games e:\ 20gig, place I intend to stick debian linux f:\ 20gig, where I keep video recorded by my tuner card and misc g:\ downloaded file archives

3 gigs for /boot is way too much. I run Gentoo and I have like 5 kernels on a 64 meg partition for /boot. I need space for /var, /opt and /tmp etc too. I'd recommended just making 3 partitions, /, /boot and /home. 10 gigs for home is fine, if you want to be safe 256 megs for boot and put the rest in /.

You need a / partition that stores everything not in another partition. I see no real need for a separate /boot, although others may disagree. I just have a swap, /home (in fat32 so I can share it with Windows), and / (ReiserFS) for everything else. It's worked fine for me.

A note: What do you mean by /(boot)? / and /boot aren't the same thing. You NEED a / on it's own partition for a working system; everything else can function as a folder inside of it. /boot is just for the kernel image and a few misc. files; it doesn't really need its own partition IMHO.

[edit for clarity]

Krumble, agreed.

A boot partition is only much good if either you're doing it to avoid the LILO and 1024 cylinder thing (old machines) or you're going to be running a non-standard filesystem. Personally, I'd go for: 10MB /boot (if you're running something like ext2 or ext3 don't bother) 1 gig swap (depends if you are really going to thrash it though) and the rest /. If you're going to be heavily using swap to the extent of 2 gigs you probably want your swap on a RAID array though. If you have 2 gigs of swap and a gig of RAM (ie, >2G total memory), I think you have to turn High Memory Support on in the kernel.

according to the beginner guide thing he sais that I'm supposed to indicate that the / partition is going to be the bootable partition so thats what he ment by / (boot)

so I think I'll go with a setup of

/swap 1gig just to be safe, not that I use up the ram I have that I know of
/home 10gigs
/ 9gigs also used for bootable partition

now the question of what file format to use, I don't even know what my options are other than the windows ones fat16, fat32, and NTFS which I used when I first partitioned my drive

Use ReiserFS, you don't need to run a disk defragment tool with it and it's pretty fast.

my thoughts on this

Have a partition for swap, and a partition for /, and that's it

As for swap, 2GB is way too much - I have a 40GB drive that I know I'm not going to fill (though perhaps only because I have an external hard drive that I share between computers for things like music and films), so I have 1GB of swap, but I've only ever used as much of 1/3 of it once, and that was when compiling 3 things and ripping a dvd all at the same time. That's with 256MB of ram, so with 1GB of ram I'd only bother with maybe 512MB of swap if I were you. Ignore the guides that say you should have 1.5 - 2.5 times your ram as swap, that's out of date and some people say that with 512MB+ of ram you don't need any swap

Sticking to one partition (+ swap) makes things easier, and the amount of space needed by different directories depends on what you use your system for, and that could change

thanks for all the help.

[Edited by - PPCThug on August 15, 2004 6:30:37 PM]

Um, take a step back for a minute here. 1gig of swap? WTF for? You'll never touch the majority of what you've got allocated and if you do, there's a serious problem. Anything more than maybe 256MB of swap is too much. Keep in mind, swap is for swapping applications out of RAM for more important ones (it's not an extension of RAM because that would make no sense given the speed difference between disk and RAM).

It's always a good idea to create several partitions rather than one single /. The reason being, if you somehow fill up log files or run an app that ends up eating disk space (it can happen if you're not careful) you won't be able to boot your system. Keeping /boot seperate will aid in preventing that. Keeping a seperate /var will also help with massive log files. Large disks make this a less common problem, but if it does happen you won't want to deal with it, and keeping several partitions has almost no cost.

Personally, I break it down like this:

/boot = 16MB (more if you run large kernels)
/home = 5-10GB (if you d/l a lot of large files, you can end up filling a drive up, this will help with that)
/var = 5GB
/ = 10GB (can go less here in some cases)
/usr = the rest of the disk (most everything gets here and since it's seperate, I can run networked /usr partitions if I ever need to)

/home can end up being a lot larger, you just need to find a balance between the apps you run and the files you put in your home directory.

I jsut installed linux on my laptop. One big 25 GB ext3 partition. (and 10GB NT and 5GB FAT)

No need for all that partitioning mess.

Swap? One word: FILE.

Keeping /home seperate for backup reasons? I use debian, never need to reinstall.

Filling up root problems? Quotas, if you're that concerned.

dynamic /dev hardlink vulnerabilities? Static for now, or use tmpfs for /dev.

There aren't many other traditional concerns with this method.