Partition Information for Tumbleweed Installation.

.................................................................................................... .................................................................................................... ...................... 08 May 2017.


To Whom it may concern,


Soon, I'll be installing the latest version of openSuSE Tumbleweed (Dated, 02 May 2017.) onto a brand new dedicated hard drive.


I have two questions concerning the custom partitioning portion of the initial installation of this Linux operating system.

My first question is, what should the Gib size of the "/" partition be?

The second question is, what should the Gib size of the "Swap" partition be?


The following is the background information.


1. The Purpose of this hard drive.

A. Participate in "SteemIt.com" social news media platform.

B. Earn/accumulate "SteemIt Dollars" crypto-currency.
... To include a software wallet.


2. My perfered Linux operating system structure.

A. / --------- (? Gig size).

B. Swap --- (? Gib size).

C. Home --- (Whatever is left in Gibs).


3. Western Digital hard drive information.

A. model ------------ black.

B. size -------------- one terrabyte.

C. max. speed ----- 7200 rpm.

D. cache ------------ 64 mb/mo.


4. motherborad information.

A. 32Bit/i386 architecture.

B. 4 Gibs of ddr dimm memory.

C. Intel Pentium 4 cpu, at 3.00ghz speed.


I have reviewed three "youtube.com" installation videos.

To include the detailed custom partitioning portion of the initial installation.


Other than the two questions I've already asked, is there anything further I need to know?

Are there any other recommendations you have for me concerning this task?


... Thank you.

Generally speaking, the size of / is independent of the projected use unless that requires special software installed, which doesn't seem to be the case with you. So 20GB should be adequate if you use ext4, double it if BTRFS. For swap, the recommendation used to be the size of your RAM, so 4GB tops. My experience is with Leap4.2, not Tumbleweed, but they are almost the same. The data you generate will be in /home anyway.

Originally Posted by Peverel Generally speaking, the size of / is independent of the projected use unless that requires special software installed, which doesn't seem to be the case with you. So 20GB should be adequate if you use ext4, double it if BTRFS. For swap, the recommendation used to be the size of your RAM, so 4GB tops. My experience is with Leap4.2, not Tumbleweed, but they are almost the same. The data you generate will be in /home anyway.

------------------------------------------------------
To Peverel.

From GeorgeThough.

Thank you for your advice.

------------------------------------------------------

I find 15gb plenty for tumbleweed / partition. Of course, unless you need loads of space for your /home partition 20gb will be OK on 1TB hdd.
I scrapped my swap partition because it never got used. Unless you intend to hibernate your system I don't think it's necessary. However, again, you've probably got the space to spare.
Good luck.

I follow some basic, and old guidelines (and habits).

Partition number one is 500Mb, formatted Ext4, mounted at /boot
Partition number two is 1.5xRAM (max 4G), formatted swap, mounted at swap
Partition number three is the remainder of the drive, formatted Ext4, mounted at /

After my system is booted, I log in as root and update /etc/fstab to include nfs-mounting "/home" from another system where all personal data is stored. This is not necessary for you, at least to start.

Keep an eye on how full your hard drive is and make changes over time if you need to. For example, if the /home directory begins to consume a significant portion of the drive, you could add a second drive, migrate all data to it from "/home", then mount that drive on the /home directory. This frees up the main drive and also ensures that users filling up the drive mounted under /home won't impact the system itself.

If applications fill the drive, consider doing the same time of thing except for the /opt or /var directories, depending on where those applications are storing large amounts of data.

If you have a lot of transient (temporary) files that can fill the disk, you may want to isolate /tmp by mounting a separate drive (not an SSD).

... if i remember correctly the maximum size of swap partition should not ecxeed the dubbeld size of RAM. Otherwise it has no effect.

In your case maximum size of SWAP partition is 8GB

Originally Posted by zorkor ... if i remember correctly the maximum size of swap partition should not ecxeed the dubbeld size of RAM. Otherwise it has no effect. In your case maximum size of SWAP partition is 8GB

2xRAM is an old formula and really isn't applicable any more. It won't hurt, but it isn't necessarily going to "help" anything. A max of 4G works perfectly fine for me because I don't run any memory hungry application daemons on my servers.

I was trying to warn you of maximum size. I have 8GB of RAM and my swap partition is almost never reached. Having a extra space which is also unused I do not mind.

But I agree with Pete(form comment above), you won't be needing it.

Please install 4GB as you attended to do and than follow the swap usage true the one of sysmonitors that you get used to work with.
You will se for your self, you wan't be needing it.

P.S Please,let us know how it went.

Originally Posted by zorkor the maximum size of swap partition should not ecxeed...

i've never heard of anything like that, ever.
i think you can have a ridiculously large amount of swap - many multiples of physical ram size - if you want to (i hear that servers do).

Originally Posted by ondoho i've never heard of anything like that, ever. i think you can have a ridiculously large amount of swap - many multiples of physical ram size - if you want to (i hear that servers do).

Either you haven't been using Linux for a long time, or you don't remember when the guidance was to not exceed 8G because the kernel couldn't address more than 4G and 2xRAM was appropriate.

While it can be as big as you'd like, the guidance was always that it shouldn't exceed 8G because it was purely wasted disk space at a time when storage was a lot more expensive than it is now.

Originally Posted by ember1205 Either you haven't been using Linux for a long time, or you don't remember when the guidance was to not exceed 8G because the kernel couldn't address more than 4G and 2xRAM was appropriate.

ok, well now i heard of it.
i read this in a very recent red hat blog article (servers with insane amounts of swap), it is very well possible that it hasn't always been like that.

@OP: sorry for the OT.

I'm not sure tumbleweed is right for a server so I assumed this was not the case with the OP. In which case swap becomes academic unless you hibernate the system or have programmes with an exceptional load on memory.
But I would not advise against swap if a person has plenty of disk space.

IMO what Peverel wrote about BTRFS should be the absolute minimum, as it employs snapshotting that can gobble space faster than most people can imagine. I have several TW installations on as little as 4.8GB, but all that small use EXT3, while the larger use EXT4, and none use BTRFS. I suggest if you're not going to be using gobs of different applications that even 8GB might be ample, but with 1TB at your disposal, there's no reason to skimp on / filesystem space. 50GB, 5% of total, wouldn't be unreasonable for EXT4 if you install a lot of apps or plan to compile software.