Pardon me if this is an outright crazy question.

If I set up only a / partition (and a swap of course), all the file structures are under "/". Simple got that.

According to at least 1 HOWTO, RedHat Secrets, Running Linux, and the infamous learn Linux in 24 hours - about 80M is needed for root(/).

Mandrake 7.2 automatically puts 3G of my drive in root, a 256 swap and the rest of the 13Gigs in /home. When I do a du I find that 37% of root is filled and /home has next to nothing in it.

So, is it 80Megs or +1G for root?

Or is it that if root has the space it goes ahead and puts /usr in it?

*confused*

As far as I know, the 80 megs is probably what is the minimum amount, root /, is the beginning of the file heiraerchy, pardon if I didn't spell that right its early, anyways, all the files and directories are under root /, Mandrake is most likely isntalling to their specifications, leaving 3 gigs for / for app's and such, they are making the /home dir the largest probably due to the fact all users files and such would go there and nowhere else, unless root gave them access. Anyways, that is my theory, well, I guess though it all depends on how you install your distro of choice. You know you can always customize it and make your own partitions their own size that you would prefer.

Drew

So its up to the distro as to which mounts are installed under which partition?

Is this in compliance with the standards? Or is there a standard?

I dont believe that there is a standard for all the distro's to adhere to, but most suppliers will set up the install to be able to run on the lowest form of hardware, ie 486, 16megs of RAM and a 2 gig harddrive (for example!).

This means that Mandake will setup partitions which will be suitable for a low spec machine, then if you have a better comp, good for you!

And yes it is up to each distro as to how they atomatically set up partitions.

There is a slight standard in partitions in that /home could be used for many diferent disto's to use. That is what I do with SUSE and Mandrake.

Thankx all! :)

How u divide your hard disk into separate partitions is up to u. The simplest is two partitions one for swap and rest for the system /,/home/usr ...
What the "Learn Linux in 24h" mean is that by give the root directory 80 MB there risk of having a breakdown on that partition is reduced. All other partitions are them mounted upon the root, building the filesystem tree. Usually the install programs make two or three partitions like for u. That way u can backup the user space more easilly.

Thankx!

So far, I have tried Mandrake 7.2, SuSE 7.0, Slackware, and Debian 2.2r2

They all seems to view this Root partition size differently. Mandrake always seems to stall, SuSE is slow as sin, Slackware was just a pain.

I think I am stickin' with Debian. It doesn't care about the size of the root partition and takes the 80Megs I gave it nicely.

Plus this Apt thing is awesome! :)

partitions
 

The simplest way of formating (at least for me) is ..
make /boot for lilo,
make a swap
take the rest of the hard disk as /