I've only used my red hat 8.0 for about 4 months. So far i'm impressed. I have a question thats been bugging me.


During the installation where it asked me which drive i wanted to install linux. I only have one drive..a 9.1 giger.

It displayed my drive and what i could gather paritions?
there was a screen where it shows sections of my harddrive and each section it designated folders like: /home /bin /var etc...

what i want to know..is each of those folders in its own parittion on the drive? (i could at the time adjust the size ).

if so, what is the general rule in associating the sizes to each drive? i mean which parititon for which folder would you increase the most?

my scenario is i'm running - a web server and also xmail server.


I want to learn linux the right way, so i can redo my server again and make it right.


thanks for the help guys.

Yup, this is where Redhat gives you the option of splitting your drive up into smaller partitions in the hope that a disaster won't take out everything. Depending on what you're doing this could be a good thing.


Create partitions for each of these and put your files there.

As for partition size, just make sure that you have enough room...


Well, maybe the "Redhat" way. Most other distros don't make a big deal about having as many partitions as Redhat does. It's a personal preference thing (and experience). I keep everything in one partition with whatever critical stuff that I have backed up in a seperate partition elsewhere. I also run multiple distros, so if I wreck one partition, I have the other available as a "rescue" partition.

Other folks would correctly point out that this is the hieght of foolishness and that I'm asking for trouble


Anytime, hope that this helps.


John

One thing I have discovered is that making the (/) partition about 300 megabytes instead of 4 gigs, makes Linux fly!

I guess...

Can you even get X (not to mention Gnome or Kde) to run in 300 Meg?


John

I guess I wasn't very clear. Of course you make the (/usr) and (/home) etc. partitions big enough for your distro, but the (/) doesn't have any executables in it, so doesn't need to be very big. It just tells the OS where all the files are. So the smaller the partition the better.

Sorry, I was thinking that you were talking about one of these tiny linux distros that we hear about from time to time.


John

No need for the apology. If I expressed myself better, there would have been no misunderstanding.

What about /bin and /sbin? Just kidding, I know what you meant, I'm just bugging you

This may be a stupid question, but after you make "/" about 300 megs, is that your mount point?

And since we've morph'ed the subject so badly, anyone know of a good app to show how much space a directory is taking? (ala "diskhog")


John