DISCUSSION: A Short Guide to Partitioning a Hard Drive for a Linux System

This thread is to discuss the article titled: A Short Guide to Partitioning a Hard Drive for a Linux System

This is so typical of the Linux community. Why did you write this?
It contains no useful "How to" information at all, and yet you
call it a tutorial. Who do you think you are? Our Daddy? Why
don't you go back and simply put a "how to" under each heading,
and delete the rest of that arrogant poop. I just did a search on
"dual boot" of Linux and WinXP. Guess what? I got nothing
except this article with tells me nothing.

johns

Originally posted by johns123 This is so typical of the Linux community. Why did you write this? It contains no useful "How to" information at all, and yet you call it a tutorial. Who do you think you are? Our Daddy? Why don't you go back and simply put a "how to" under each heading, and delete the rest of that arrogant poop. I just did a search on "dual boot" of Linux and WinXP. Guess what? I got nothing except this article with tells me nothing. johns

Then you should simply move on as this article might help others.

Review our rules, if you have nothing constructive to say, then don't say it and just move on to the next thread.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

If you want to post negative comments, do it constructively and explain yourself in why you think it was not helpful. There is no need to post utter crap like this which is not the least bit helpful itself.

If you want to discuss this privately, feel free to email me or the admin of the site. If not, then lets move on with the topic, IN A CONSTRUCTIVE MANNER PLEASE!

Regards.

Hi Moses,

I can't thank you enough for this very instructive tutorial.
In my humble opinion, you are a talented, highly professional writer.
Keep writing!

Hartmann.

I have to agree, I thought it was great. I always say I'll make multiple partitions next time and now I think I really will.

A decent article. I learned a lot about partitions—why they're important, how to create them—and about the organization of the filesystem.

My only criticism is that your partitioning suggestions aren't very useful. You list a few system types (Server, Workstation, Game-playing computer, etc.) and then have short paragraphs for each with suggestions on how to partition the drive(s). Below are your suggestions for Desktop/Gaming machines:

You'll want a lot of space in /home, and it should be on its own partition. You'll probably also want to have extra space in /opt and /usr … You'll need to have a lot of space available for your 500+ MB games, which means you should have separate partitions for /opt and /usr, … Also, leave enough space on / … You should also look at putting a few GB into a /tmp partition. Make sure you don't forget about the swap partition!

So I should have lots of space for, uh, pretty much everything? I don't think this is particularly helpful. I can see that you want to avoid stating percentages explicitly (you mention that most people say "twice as much swap space as RAM" which isn't always best), but you need to say something.

Perhaps you could create a list of priorities and explain what users are most likely to want. For example:

A gaming system will require lots of space for game data, so a large /opt and /usr partition is most important. Second most important in a gaming system is large swap space so that load-times are reduced. Therefore you should make these partitions reasonably large compared to your /home and root partitions. For workstations, documents are the most important, so the /home directory should be pretty large. If you're working with multimedia (video, images, or sound) be sure to also have enough swap space so editing won't be slow (make your swap as large as the largest file you'll have to edit at a time, plus 100M). However, for other types of editing, the swap space isn't as important, so you can have a larger /opt, /usr partition…

(I don't know if the suggestions above are wrong or not, so please don't hold me to them)

People reading your article need to know why to make certain partitions certain sizes. Tell them what a larger /home partition means and why they do/don't need one. Don't worry about saying things like "your /tmp partition doesn't need to be more than 15% of your total disk space."

Other than that, it's a good article. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Thanks, guys!

Soupface,
You are correct, I didn't really want to state exact numbers because it depends on too many variables (disk size, number of applications, usage, etc.). However, you are also correct in stating that there should probably be more useful examples of how large specific partitions should be. . .
I'm unable to edit the original LA, so I'll have to post a errata here. That won't happen for some time, but I'll get to it, eventually. Thanks for your suggestions!

Thanks Moses

as a newbie...just 2 months into using Linux...i appreciate the time u spent writing this....

Thanks again
Tom

Hello,

moses, I totally agree with Hartmann - it's a very good article.

I have one comment for people reading it, though. I reacted on the gigantic /boot partition - 1 gig! Considering that it probably only will contain a few kernels, come kernel config files and possibly some initrd images, even 100 megs will definitely be enough.

Cheers!

Holy Cow! I didn't catch that in the editing. . . Yeah, that is huge! It should read something like 100 MB or maybe even 50 MB. . . I've got 9 different kernels in my /boot, some of which have boot splashes and other initrds associated with them and I only use 12 MB. . .

Thanks!

Good info! Thanks!

I find it very difficult to give any credence to the first respondant/troll, who dissed you. He offered absolutely NO constructive guidance, so, is typical of the types of posting that I ignore. I noticed he didn't offer to write an article! If he thinks he is such an expert, he should offer to teach the rest of us!

I build up salvaged systems, and put Debian (from Knoppix) on them. My preference, and advice to newbies, is to KISS. For most installs, a 5 Gb home partition, plus the swap file, will do'er.

Do you have some advice about making and using, more partitions? I used to make a 60 to 100 Mb Boot partition, but, I quit that.

Originally posted by Sage1 Good info! Thanks! I find it very difficult to give any credence to the first respondant/troll, who dissed you. He offered absolutely NO constructive guidance, so, is typical of the types of posting that I ignore. I noticed he didn't offer to write an article! If he thinks he is such an expert, he should offer to teach the rest of us!

While I understand that some people would find the article possibly less than helpful, I ignore responses like the above. . . If people want to intelligently discuss what the problem with it is, I'm more than happy to do so--I KNOW I don't know everything about computers, so I'd learn in the process.

I build up salvaged systems, and put Debian (from Knoppix) on them. My preference, and advice to newbies, is to KISS. For most installs, a 5 Gb home partition, plus the swap file, will do'er. Do you have some advice about making and using, more partitions? I used to make a 60 to 100 Mb Boot partition, but, I quit that.

Typically, the KISS solution is perfect. The issue comes when it's not possible to be simple (need to have two different version of Linux installed, or whatever). I think a 5 GB home partition is fine and should be more than enough for most peoples' uses. My laptop doesn't have one at all anymore (I used to put a /home partition, but I'm the only one who uses it, and will be the only one to use it so I created a /work partition instead).

My advice concerning boot partitions is that if you don't want to have to worry about kernel corruption due to filesystem problems, you should have a separate partition for /boot. This is simply because if it's used less, it's less likely to break. If you want to have two different installations (different root, /usr, etc.), then you should have a /boot partition so that you can keep your kernels all nice and tidy in one place. . .

Really, like it says above, it depends on what the system is for. . . Any time you expect you'll be adding more data to a specific place, it should probably be on a separate partition. If your data is valuable/important, it should probably be on a separate partition. I almost always have a / and a /usr partition because I think the two should be kept apart from everything else (/usr is usually used as the catch-all for packagers to put their software).

Hey guys,

What's the KISS solution? Never heard of it.

Cheers

=-}

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Ah, yes of course... I'd better keep it extremely simple then