newbie - partionning 25Gig
 

Hi,

I'm new to the linux scene and so far most of the howtos and tutorials about partitioning that I have encountered are limited to fairy small hard drives. I would like to mess around with Mandrake 8 using simple features and eventually more complex things like dns servers, email servers, dhcp servers etc...
My current Hard disk drive is approx. 25Gigs
I would greatky appreaciate it if someone could give me a good idea of how (sizes) to partion it. (btw I have 384Megs Ram)
Thanks

Tony

Linux will automatically partition some of that for /boot and for the swap file. For the rest of the hard drive, here is my advice. If you partition it into several different drives, you're going to have to mount them to a directory to use them anyways. So why not just make the rest of the drive one huge partition? Unless you think you'll want to put another operating system on one of the other partitions or something like that... otherwise, I'd just make it a nice, big, fat, partition.

Ever thought about using LVM ?

I would do the first install with the following lay-out.

100M for /
32M for /boot
200M for /tmp
500M for /usr
250M for /var
100M for /home
400M swap

/opt is not necessary because no software is installed there at first. I use it for all soft that does not come from an RPM package.

Afterwards, create a number of big partitions on your HDD which will serve as LVM physical volumes.

To use LVM, I would advice you to first install it via the RPM delivered with linux and afterwards install the latest production version from the source (http://www.sistina.com).

Big advantage of LVM is that you can extend your filesystems when you need to.

Don't put root and boot under LVM. This will cause a lot of problems if you ever have a problem; LVM filesystems are not available from the rescue system on the CD.

Also a good idea is to make two root partitions and two boot partitions. If something goes wrong with one of them, you still have the other to boot from.

Probabely a lot of docs to read, but once you know how it works, you'll probabely love it.