Hi all,

I am going to be making the switch from windows to linux in the next week or so. I have about 5 years experience running a NetBSD box as a personal server with no x windows desktop, so I am familiar with using a command line.

This past weekend I installed ubuntu (with edubuntu) on my 5 year old sons computer moving it from windows xp. I was really impressed with what I saw. The last time I played with linux was about a decade ago. It has really come along way (at least the GUI has)!

It has motivated me to make the switch from windows xp to linux on my home system. I am planning on purchasing another hard disk to use exclusively for this process so my windows installation can remain intact for the time being. I am planning on using ubuntu to get my feet wet.

I would like to know the best way to partition the new drive so that in the future I can easily format the linux partition and switch to a different distro (while maintain my software settings like firefox and thunderbird). I am thinking that I should have a partition scheme based on the following:

/
/home
/usr/local
/var
/tmp
/swp

With the majority of the space dedicated to /home. With that scheme what would I have to do to install a new distro? Simply format /,/var,/tmp and /smp and then install?

Is this a good idea or should I follow some other scheme - with an eye towards changing distro? For the sake of argument say the hard disk is 500 GB.

Cheers,
Troy

Here is a tutorial in which I used and like


http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=147959

I have seven installed with room for a lot more.

If your current hard drive is not too full you could use that same one simply by resizing your Windows partition with GParted- a guide is located here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...sta-partition/

Note: I didn't actually have the horrific things in there happen.

With that being said... I find this to be the best setup for a hard drive:

/ about 10-15gb
swap about 2-4gb
/home everything else

I've never put /var or anything else off on its own. With this setup, everything right down to desktop configuration is maintained from install to install, just format / and mount but don't format /home.

Larry, thanks for the tip! I don't think I will be installing that many O/S It is handy to know that it can be done. If I have more then one O/S on the computer, I'll never get anything done



Shane, I like the idea of having / separate and just formatting that as necessary when/if I decide to try a new system out.

Cheers,
Troy