Problem with software install and hard drives
 

The home partition is meant to hold your personal data while the / partition is meant to store software packages - so nothing unusual there.

The 8GB partition should be large enough for most purposes - once you have both KDE and Gnome installed, there aren't any really large packages left.

Peter, it may be better if you get a copy of gparted and used that to enlarge the / partition (I have all my linux stuff on one hard drive, I use /boot, /swap, / and /home partitioning scheme - I don't really need the /boot but thats leftover from ages ago when it was required for a default install of gentoo linux), my / is about 40 gigs (only because all my linux stuff is on a 320 gig HDD so I have the space). I'd suggest that you might think about making it about 20 gigs or so in size as it's quite easy to get "carried away". I often suffer from the "Oh that looks like a good idea" syndrome and before I know it, my / partition has about 25 gigs of applications in it! :D

regards

John

p.s. but with say, 20 gigs /, 1 gig or so /swap and the rest /home it should give you plenty of room to have lots of user type stuff i.e. music, pictures/photos, etc etc.

Thanks John.

I'm downloading the package you recommended, and will adjust my / partition.

PK

But what about things like games and applications? Are they limited to the smaller partition? I know music and data files can get large, but you would seem to run out of space pretty quick that way.

PK

Most packages you install in the future will be installed under /usr. If you wanted to, you could reduce the size of the /home partition and create a new partition for the /usr directory. This will free up space on the root directory as well. The largest partition will for a desktop computer be /home. The second largest will be the /usr directory. ( A server may not have regular users or nearly as much user oriented programs installed. )

I might have too much installed now, but to give you an idea, my /usr directory contains over 5 GB.
It will grow in time. The /bin, and /sbin directories will probably not grow very much. They contain 8 MB and 14 MB respectively. The /lib, and if applicable /lib64 directories, will probably grow very slowly. Most software will install libraries in /usr/lib instead of /lib. ( /lib 104M; /; /lib64 12M; /usr/lib 934M )
The /opt directory is where KDE and Gnome install their programs. ( /opt 1.9 GB)
The /var directory will probably contain among other things, the database for your packaging system, will may grow some as time goes on. (/var 566M)

jay73:

Thanks. That helps me understand it a bit more. I'll be finding out as much as I can about file structures, being a noob and all.

And by the way, I may not be a code monkey anymore, but I do love my fritos. :p

Thanks
 

Jay:

Thanks again for the info. I was able to poke around my filesystem a bit, and I'm slowly getting a hold of where things go. I downloaded the Gnuparted .iso, and will burn it on CD as soon as I get my hands on a blank. Interestingly, it was already on my system, but evidently I can't unmount hda1 or hda6 while I'm running my system, and I can't resize without unmounting.

BTW, if you were looking for a site/sites to reccommend to newbies like myself for getting up to speed in Linux (basic stuff like getting around the desktop/file system, rpms and tars/gz's, UNIX commands, setting up your own homepage, etc..) is there anywhere in particular you can think of?

Thanks,
Peter Knox

BTW, this Linux thing can be like a disease...my wife just showed me a laptop she's not using (HP Pentium 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, sadly only 40 GB HDD), and I'm already thinking about installing Linux on it and taking it to school...might use Mandriva, but Ubuntu looks nice too, and I'm researching other distros as we speak...

John:

I managed to download and burn the .iso for gparted, and just tried to run it. I am easily able to decrease the size of /hda3(my 67G drive), but I can't resize /hda1, because the max size allowed is set to the size it already is (7.8G). I tried shrinking my /hda3 by about 8G (to get a 16G or so /hda1), but I evidently can't use that space for /hda1, as gparted won't let me increase the amount. I even tried positioning the "new" 8G partition directly to the right of /hda1, but to no avail. Am I just being an idiot, or is it something else?

At this point, unless I'm just doing something really stupid (and if so, please let me know, because it would hardly be the first time) I'm just thinking of doing a reinstall - how would I setup a non-default partition if I did that?

BTW, is what I'm going through a "Mandriva thing", or would this happen with all distros? Do SUSE or Ubuntu handle this better? Would a newbie (who plans to not be a noob forever) be better off with SUSE or Ubuntu as opposed to Mandriva?

Thanks again,

Peter Knox

Pete, I've only had to play with gparted the once - due to a failed hard drive. while I was meddling, I found that I had to do the operations one at a time for the best results.

I think you should find, that if you decreased the size of the larger partition (the numbers change in the box, I think it says about how much space you want before the partition you're meddling with), apply the change, then if you think necessary, reboot the gparted disc and then it should (as I understand it) show some unallocated space between the partitions - erm, looking at your numbering, I'm presuming that you have hda1 as /, is there hda2 - presuming that thats the /swap ??? and then the /home is hda3 ?????

If all else fails, just use the gparted to completely reformat the drive, and then re-make the partitions to the size you want. jschiwal's post explains what takes up the room in a system. Personally I wouldn't have gone for a separate /usr (some people have a partition for each directory, but I find that that makes it very complicated - especially the /etc/fstab file which is what basically tells the system what partitions are what and what needs "mounting" at boot etc, but don't worry about that for the moment).

Hence I'm suggesting what is a reasonably sensible starter setup. Re-reading your original post, I don't know if I'm guessing right, but it would appear that hda1 and then hda6 suggests that the hda6 was a logical partition from something extended. I don't know if you want to go down that route or not. I'd suggest that if you have the whole 80 gig drive to play with, then excellent. If it were mine, I'd make the / about 25 gigs, the /swap would be 2x the installed RAM and the rest would be /home (I have all my music ripped into both FLAC and Ogg formats, so it takes up about 40 gigs :D ). as jschiwal pointed out, the largest directory in the / will probably end up being the /usr, so 25 gigs should give you plenty of room for stuff.

'Sup to you.

Oh and as for your wifes laptop, it's pretty much the same as my desktop was when I bought it 3 or 4 years ago, except you have more RAM. I say it's an ideal candidate, because a 2 gig P4, with a 40 gig hdd and 512 megs of RAM was what I dual booted i.e. WinXP and Mandrake (what Mandriva used to be called before they bought out the Connectiva distro). So you could easily have a 15 gig /, a 2 gig /swap and the rest for /home. I'd also suggest that you "take it under your wing" because it'd be great for your learning curve. It's often (as I understand it) harder to install onto a laptop, but only because they tend to use the different/less common hardware components - but it'd be excellent IMO! Get it installed and then customise the desktop as much as possible - a real pose :D

regards

John

p.s. Oh and having no real expertise with linux, just 5 or 6 years of light meddling, having tried various distros, both ones like Mandriva, right down to Gentoo (a serious "power user" type distro that can be a real bugger to install), I'd say that you can't go far wrong with this Sidux that I now use. I comes as a live CD so you can boot it and run it from the CD first, as it's based on Debian SID (some call it "unstable", but thats half of what it's about, making the "unstable" stable). It's reasonably straight forward to install, keeping it up to date is basic (I just use the updating script and it give you numbered choices and yes/no answers) and as long as you can get online (with or without the live CD) theres excellent assistance from their IRC channel (don't worry that theres lots of german spoken on the channel, thats got more to do with where the developers came from - but thats another saga) - I do read their forums and documentation, but if I have anything that I can work out and am getting impatient with (a frequent occurance) I just log into the IRC and ask away. Lots of the developers hang out there. I reckon it's bloody brilliant! Still, as ever, it's up to you!