Partition Sizes...?

[Legg83]

Alright, I've been on and off with linux for a few years now, and I've decided to go hard core once again. I want to stray away from having the 3 gig ext2 partiton mounted on '/' and that being it.

I've read many partition HOWTOs, and all are unfortunatly out of date. I would like to start making different partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /home... and so forth, but I still havent gotten a deffinate answer on how big these partitions should be. All of the HOWTOs are talking about a 1gig disk drive, and obviously i have a bit more space to use than 1gig.

What I'm looking at is about 4 gigs of free space for linux slackware 8. I have 256megs of pc133 ram... My system will be a stand alone system for myself, I will have apache installed for testing websites, but it will not be used for 100% uptime hosting for entire web sites. I inticipate installing star office, netscape, some chatting utilities, and maybe a couple of games like quake3 or unreal t.

How much space do I need to devote to each partition?

Thanks

[Legg83]

and what about /opt?

[Legg83]

Does anybody see a problem with...

500 meg /home
2.5 gig /usr
500 meg '/'

?

[DMR]

You should be OK with that. My / and /home are both about 500M, and there is still plenty of free space in both. Just keep an eye on /usr; most of the crap you install is going to end up there, so it can fill up pretty quickly.

What about swap? Are you going to use a separate partition for it, a swapfile, or are you just going to skip it altogether?

[teeitup]

This is from the front page of this site.
It's a nice O'Reilly article on setting up the proper file system.
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/10/11/filesystem.html

Good Luck,

[X_console]

You should create a /var and /tmp. /opt is completely optional and you can just have a symlink /opt pointing to /usr/opt if you like.

There is no straight answer on how big each partition should be. It's up to you. / doesn't need to be huge. 100MB is probably the max you need. /usr and /home will be the largest to accomodate user files. /tmp should be at least 200MB, and maybe larger depending on how many people are going to be using the system, and what programs they'll be running. /var should be about 200MB as well, but maybe larger depending on whether or not you expect to have large logs coming in.

[Hena]

I used RH so far and it seems to be quite simple with automatic partitioning. So could someone tell me what problems might arise from system with /boot on ~50mb partition and / and swap having the rest? Meaning that if you don't create partitions for all the main directories, their size isn't limited from the beginning? I mean that it does give more leeway on their needed size.

[jdctx]

The problem is if you really don't know how much of a /opt /boot or a /var you will use it wastes alot of space you can actually just have only a "/" and swap and thats it but I would suggest at least a "/" "/usr" and "/home" min.

On a mandrake 8.1 install for example you may use around
/boot only uses 2-5mb
/opt under 1mb
/etc,/var,/root ect 100-200mbs
/usr ~ 2gig
/home under 10mb

[ 24 November 2001: Message edited by: jdctx ]

[posterboy]

There is simply no way to ever answer these questions. Leaving a huge / directory may be tolerable, but the "real" solution is LVM. It allows changing "drive" sizes on the fly, and has been a boon, here. I have about a years experience with it, on 2 different drives, issue free. Do a google for linux lvm, if you are interested. HTH, Ray

[Hena]

Now after reading HOW-To on LVM just to check what it basicly is i'm back with more thinking.

As far as i can see, using lvm is basicly doing software raid, with some extra options. If one has one disk it basicly is pretty much same as creating the absolute minimium amount of partitions (/boot, / and swap) and using / as a storage area for the linux. One wild thing might be using lvm to create a dynamic swap. As an x amount of swap and then increasing it if more memory is needed. Not really possible, is it. Or is there a possible to enlarge swap with some command (only swap command that i know atm is mkswap)?

But other than that, i don't see a reason why not create a big / as an storage area if you use a one disk. Or are there reasons why one might not mount /? Other than (atleast ext2) to check it from time to time. Btw is it possible to force e2fsck during boot with ext2 like it does for /boot (ext2, differetn partition)?