Not really much to add, but I did want to re-affirm: it's all a matter of personal choice.
Here's what I use:
Code:
hda1 / 4.7G
hda2 swap 0.5G
hda3 /usr 14G
hda5 /opt 2.8G
hda6 /var 6.6G
hda7 /tmp 9.4G
hda8 /home 75G
hdb2 /usr/share/multimedia 103G
But just because you can do something like this, doesn't mean that you should. One downside is that boot time is increased as all the filesystems are checked.
Something like this can be handy, though. For instance:
I have all my multimedia on a separate disk drive. I feel it's easier to maintain that way. Plus, this idea is pretty handy on multi-user systems. Say you have three people with MP3 collections. Probably a lot of dupes. This can be set up as a shared location for multimedia. Control access with groups.
/tmp can be placed on a separate partition and mounted noexec, nosuid, etc. for increased security (paranoia
)
/home can be placed on a separate partiton for similar reasons. Plus, it can make upgrades easier.
/var can be mounted on a separate partition to avoid DoS attacks that attempt to fill up server logs.
Heavy partitioning can be used for lots of other reasons, too. It's easier to add diskspace. For instance ,let's say home is on it's own partition, and that partition gets full. You can always pop in a new harddrive, copy /home to it, edit /etc/fstab, and have all the room you need.
Learning the right partitioning scheme for you can take a bit of frustrating trial and error, in my experience. You don't want partitions too big, because you may need the space they occupy for somethign else. You don't want them too small, because you'll run out of space. Also, locking your box down with options like noexec, ro, nosuid, etc. can lock your box down so tight that you aren't able to easily do the things on your box that you want to do.
On the issue of swap: I always use the lesser of 2X RAM or 512MB. If you have a lot of ram, you aren't going to be swapping very often. Unless you are running certain software, in which case, you should probably already have an idea what type of requirements you will have.
