suggestions Debian hard drive partitions
 

i have a dell inspiron 8100, 80 gig hard drive, 512 mb ram. i would like some suggestions on how to partition my hard drive with
debian. i get lost when trying to configure.
p.s. i am sort of a newbie.
thanks
bear:newbie:

I guess the first question is this: what will this machine be used for? Desktop? Firewall?

Also, what kind of files are you likely to keep in /home ?? This has messed me up dreadfully ---- I didn't plan for photos and .mpeg /.avi files. My /home is now bursting at the seams. Luckily, I have a big HDD and I can create new partitions on unsed space to become /mnt/movies etc.

My! I do like the concept of "unsed space" :)

laptop will be used as a desktop replacement, i will be adding music and pictures etc. files kept banking, investments.

Then you'll want a fairly substantial /home. I'm not sure how many partitions you want, but I'd probably do something like this:

100 MB - /boot
512 MB - swap
15 GB - /
remainder - /home

I agree. The setup suggested is fine.
The only thing you might want to try is the solution posted earlier - creating an extra partition and mounting it at /mnt/movies or whatever later. I have had a couple of issues before when I created a large /home partition to store everything, since - if you want to install another distribution later, and you keep your /home, since this is where you stack all your goods, the system will look for your personal config files in /home/you, and since these are written for your previous system, you may have to clean up a thing or two. But this is a minor issue. Debian is good for a long-time installation. Apt will make sure you don't have to make an installation upgrade - it can be made a gradual process, unlike with many other distributions.

Which is why Debian resides on my firewall/NAT box. Gentoo has similar features (on a separate note) for my desktop.


Also, do consider the above option if you want to share files (movies, isos, whatever) among many users: I have a /public partition on my box.

thank you so much
 

thanks to all who responded, now i have a good start . bear :D