i have 110 gigs allocated for a linux partition. i am currently running open suse 11.1 and believe i partitioned wrong. i put all my space in my home drive, gave root 4 gigs and swap 3 gigs.

i dont understand which directory should have the most space for things like installed programs, such as banshee or u torrent, wine things like that.

can anyone reccomend a good setup for partitioning based on my size. i would like to re install.


thank you so much for your help

the automatic partitioning suggestions are normally fine. keep, say, 90 gig for /home, 2gb swap, 100mb for /boot and the rest for /

Device
Filesystem
Total space
Available space

/home ext3 98.6 GB 93.0 GB free

/ ext3 4.9 GB 115.1 MB free


OS Information
OS: Linux 2.6.27.19-3.2-pae i686

System: openSUSE 11.1 (i586)
KDE: 4.1.3 (KDE 4.1.3) "release 4.9"
Display Info
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Model: GeForce 8500 GT/PCI/SSE2
Driver: 3.0.0 NVIDIA 180.29

i dont understand why i have only 115 mb free in my / directory


is this a good configuration?


i have only had this on for 2 days but im adding programs like crazy to try them out cause im not sure whats good to use and whats not

Acid Kewpie, just wondering...

Why a partition for /boot ?

I partition this way: 15 gb for / (more than enough for my distribution), 2 gb for /swap (in fact, barely need it) and the rest for /home. Is that wrong in your opinion ? Why ?

Kurquhart1, your partition for / is way to small. IMHO 10 gb is a minimum for a recent distribution.

thank you, so should i make it say 20 gigs 2 gigs for swap and the rest for home?

I suggest between 10GB and 20GB for "/". Put the rest in "/data" and leave "/home" on the "/" partition. Use "/data" to store all your data, of course. Done this way, it doesn't matter which distro you foul up, err use, or how you manage to muck up "/home"; you can always get to your data.

4GB is not much for an OS root partition anymore. 10-15 much more reasonable, depends on size of your hard drive(s) as to what you have available but the above suggestions are good. You add new programs, do updates, etc.. you're adding to your root fs.

i also use firefox as my browser. can anyone tell me what directory i should store downloaded files in? like say i download a pic from the net, it gives me the option to open it or save it, i always save but im unsure where i should be saving to.

Quakeboy02, I object to this. It's good to be able to easily keep /home whilst re-formatting / to install a new distribution or version from scratch.

As for the data I keep them in sub directories of /home, not under /home/myusername.

this directory thing is so confusing, i dont understand what "home" is used for and where the majority of my free space should be kept.

/boot is not really part of a distribution, it can be shared between multiple distros containing all kernel images, and bootloader configs. If your / has issues, then that will affect /boot to, but you would do well to keep /boot seperate and never actually mount it. you only need to mount it when you change grub, add a kernel etc... otherwise nothing ever uses it within the booted system. And if you don't mount it, there's much less chance of it getting corrupted.

OK Chris, I understand your standpoint.

Mine is slightly different because I only use one distribution. If/when I want to try another one I put it in a virtual machine. So I do not need a separate /boot partition. For instance as of now ant till 2009/08/01 (end of my license) I have Windows 7 beta in VirtualBox.

yes, but you still should avoid mounting the filesystem if you don't need to.

You might consider just selecting the directory for each download. That obviates the need to move stuff around after it's downloaded. I have a "/data/downloads" directory to put general junk in that I may or my not ever use.