Partition Opinions
 

Hi, I'm new to Linux and wanted to get some opinions on partitioning. I have Fedora Core 1 and my new hd should be here tomorrow. I know how to partition, I just can't decide what all I should make.

I have read several things about it already but still can't decide. I will be dual booting with WinXP. I have a 120gb drive with XP installed currently. The new drive is also a 120gb. I will probably partition 50gb as ntfs to be shared between the two OS's for my personal files.

How should I partition the other 70 gb? I know I need a / and swap and will make a /home. Should I make any others? And how should I split up the drive space?

This wil be just for home user desktop - games/internet/personal open office docs/pictures etc. All of the document files and pictures will be on the ntfs part. I like to install software just to play with so I'll probably install a lot of stuff just to try it out.

Edit: I have 1gb ram.

Thanks in advance,
Dave

If you are partitioning, make one ntfs for xp, one fat32 for sharing and one for Linux. All you really need is /, /swap and I always do a /boot. A seperate /home is good if you want to reinstall and retain your home directory.

Although Linux can read ntfs, it is still experimental, far better to have a shared fat32 drive.

How much hd space should I have for each of these:

/
/swap - I figure 2gb max @ 2 x ram
/boot
/home

I'll have around 70gb to use.

Thanks,
Dave

My set up is as follows

/boot - 100mb (too much I think as only 5mb is used)

/home - 9.3gig

/opt - 1.5gig

/usr - 4 gig

/ - 1.5gig

/swap is 768mb & I have 256mb ram

I often mess around and ofcourse mess things up so sometime I have to reinstall. Having partitions for /usr (where you prgrams go), /opt (optional programs like KDE, Open Office), /home( as you know - all your personal files) means reinstalls are much easier.

Of my root (/) partition only 459mb is used so the extra gig is a bit of a waste - this space does fill up however when performing some tasks as /temp is in root. I would suggest then that you make a partition for /temp. I would suggest about 3+gig - it might be a bit of overkill but then you wont have to worry.

I don´t think you need a 2 gig swap - with that much memory you wont be swapping much - perhaps a 1:1 ratio here would be better - although I am no expert so listening to some of the veterans would be a good idea.

Oh you might also want to leave 5 or 6 gig as empty space on the hard drive in case in the future you decide you want to install/ try out another operationg system or something.

All my partitions are formatted in RieserFS apart from swap which has its own file system & /boot which uses ext3 for compatibilty

How does this sound:

/ = 1gb
/swap = 1gb
/tmp = 2gb
/boot = 1gb
/home = 10gb
/usr = 10gb
/opt = 10gb

That's 35gb total so I would have room for 2 versions if I wanted to try another later on. I would have enough space to set up the exact same file structure for both. Sounds like the drive I bought may be more than I need.

Thanks,
Dave

1 gig for root sounds good & /temp also sounds good.

/boot doesn need to be that big - 150mb is way more than enough - probably even overkill. My boot partition is 100mb & only 5mb is used

with Home I usually leave it untill the end and give it the reaining free space on the drive. The size of your home partition will depend on a few things like how many users will your system have since each of there home accounts will be stored there. If you paln on using multimedia files like mp3s & video files your /home partition needs to be large as it will fill up quickly.

Generally I make home as large as it can be but I have heard of people having say 650mb (CDrom sized home folders) so they have to back up often which is good standard practice anyway. These kind of people probably aren´t storing multimedia files in their home filder though - so as far as /home goes - bigger is better.

I installed all the apps on the distro CD which is alot and found tha not an awful lot goes into /opt - hence my /opt partition is only 1.5gig I´d say you can come right down with regard to /opt.

/usr - again with everything installed from the distro CD I´m only using 1.9gig for /usr so I would go with say 5gig for /usr.

I think 120 GB hard drive for LINUX is too much. You are better off using a smaller capacity drive and use the 120 GB hard drive for downloads, videos, sound, graphics files.

Your layouts are ok to get started using LINUX. The layout to get very, very good performance in LINUX

starting from the front of the drive to the end
/var 256 MB
swap 1 GB to 2 GB (2 GB max per swap)
/usr 4 GB to 8 GB (dependong on programs)
/usr/lib 1 GB to 2 GB
/tmp 1 GB to 2 GB (darn games and some programs extract files in tmp that reaches near a gig)
/ 512 MB to 1 GB
/home the rest of the drive but leave room for /boot
/boot 16 MB to 50 MB (depending on what bootsplash screens you want. I have none)

I did the above for my PII 400 MHz. Its a lof faster than it was in Windows. Now I need to do the same for my AMD 700 MHz system. If you can put /var, /usr, /usr/lib, and swap on seperate drives the system can work in parallel. I use XFS because it caches a lot more and it works much faster. Though you can use any filesystem that you want. If you have two similar drives, you can set two or more swap partitions the same priority to work in RAID 0 with out having any problems setting it up. A few lines from my fstab file shows an example what I mean.

/dev/hde1 swap swap pri=5,defaults 0 0
/dev/hdg1 swap swap pri=5,defaults 0 0

Since my swap partitions are closer to the center, the accessing speed will be very good. Probably my the bandwidth will be over the roof.

My /opt is empty, so I do not see a point of making a seperate partition of it. Check whats in your /opt directory to see if your computer can take of advantage of putting it on another partition to work in parallel.

not sure why big swap is always recommended, i have 512MB of RAM, but i set my swap to 200MB, and I always noticed the swap usage is either at zero most of the time or 1 % or so when I have many proggies running at the same time, so i guess even at 200MB is already an overkill. Just my personal observation.