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Installed Mandy (9.1) to dual boot with windows, on my laptop. I let Linux install itself on a 8GB (unallocated) partition. It created three partitions: /(root) - /swap - /home. It seems that I should have chosen to customize the partitioning.
Looking for a basic (rule of thumb) schema i.e.:
/ (root) how large? what data/files would go in this partition ??
/swap 1GB
/boot - how large? what data/files would go in this partition ??
/var - how large? what data/files would go in this partition ??
/temp - how large?
/home - how large?
/some other directory(s) that would benefit being on its own partition - ?
Additional facts for consideration;
There is only 1 user.
This is not a production machine.
No server services running.
There is a 4GB (fat32) data partition (this is to allow me to access my (existing) documents from either OS).
I know there are differing opinions on partitioning Im just looking for a generalized idea or a source of information.
/home is where your files will stay. So you have to think about what you're going to use it for. Like documents only aren't going to fill up a few GB partition easily while music or films can do. I have mine at 5 GB cause I don't have many large files in my /home.
If it's just a home use machine, just having /, /home, and swap is probably sufficient. Most applications go in /usr, so it can be handy to have this as a separate partition. /boot should always go on the beginning of the hard drive, and is small (<100 MB) and stores only kernel images/ram disks, i.e. boot related stuff. It's sometimes used to get around limitations with older BIOSes only being able to boot from a kernel located on the first 1024 hard drive cylinders. Usually a lot of mail, WWW site files and such can be stored in /var (but this is all customizable), so usually servers need a separate /var partition.
There's no hard and fast rule on this -- it depends on what the machine is to be used for. For the basic home system, it's probably just sufficient to have a separate /home partition, so you can keep your data if you need reinstall.
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