When installing different distros of linux you are presented with various choices for setting the partitions on the hard drive. I have successfully installed everything to one big partition under /, plus a swap partition. Other times I have set up a swap and then a / partition and then another partition for home. One is also presented with other choices. Is there an advantage to creating several partitions? Is it faster, or easier to do back ups, or what?

Usually its best to create multiple partitions. Say for instance like /var and /tmp usually get filled up since one is for temp files and the other is log files..
If for some reason your machine goes bezerk and fills your logs completely up, it will fill your whole hard drive.. thus making no space left and causing your machine not to boot, etc. Same instance for your tmp directory..
If you create them with their own partition and something happens, they will only fill up their partition and not your whole drive.

Some create a /home partition just in case they want to reinstall their system but leave user's custom settings and files intact without messing with them.. them being on their own partition you can avoid at times restoring a system and having to backup this directory.

Usually when I install my Linux system, I usually create a

/boot
swap
/
/usr
/tmp
/var
/home

And usually for like data I share like mp3's and movies, etc, I always create a /data partition for those.

So if I ever have to reinstall my whole system, I can leave my /home and /data partition alone, not damaging or wiping out the data on them.

trickykid,

That makes sense. Thanks. It seems to me it should even be possible to share a partition, like say /data or /home, between two distros?

You got it. Usually you can easily share /home, /tmp and other data type partitions that you used just to share misc files and such..

Additionally (and I use the /data system, as well) I haev a friend who dual boots, and makes one partition fat32 (vfat) and sets it up as a seperate drive in windows. That way, if he has to kill his windows install, or his linux install...


Another good point is for upgrading (via replacement) of particular disks. Just being able to toss in a larger hard drive if that particular space/speed goes higher. If you are dealing with Sun boxes, a lot of times you want to know where the high IO is coming from, and you can just check partitions.

I could also point out that it is a lot easier to set up a RAID with multiple partitions than without. Can be specific as to what you want mirrored. For example, I mirror /home and /data, but not /tmp and /usr.

Don't forget sharing your swap between distros.

Also be careful share a single username and home dir between disto's. You can do it, but if you like to play a lot, and want to get a true feel for a distro, you will want a fresh install of the default home enviroment. I usually just create a variation of my name, ie. peters for suse, peterd for debian.

Cheers,
Pete