Greets,

After fiddling around with linux for ~1 year now I have finally made the bold decission to move away from Windows completely and remove it alltogether from my main desktop.

This gives me now, not one, but two hard drives for my slackware system (Go me!). One 80 GB drive and one 200 GB drive.
'Allright, that shouldn't be too hard', I tell myself as I open a spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org. 15 minutes and 3 schemes later I realized that 280 gig is actually quite a lot of space for little ol' me.

It also raised some questions that I never really thought about, so after googling and reading forums for a day or two I end up here hoping some of you might be able to help.

Some questions I had:
- Does it matter if I create 1 primary partition and dump the rest in extended? From what I know linux doesn't really care about primary or logical, but since I want to put /boot first / would end up in logical, besides that feeling 'wrong' to me somehow (call me weird), would it really matter?
- Do I really need to seperate /tmp or/and /var if I create a / of 5 GB minimum? Expecially since this is just a home desktop system I'm not sure if I should even be considering seperating these two, plus I want to keep things relatively simple.
- Would a /usr of 20 GB really be too much?
- Also, if I did make a 20 GB /usr would I even need a seperate /usr/local? I'm guessing not, unless you're thinking about security and permissions.
- Which leads me to /opt. I've read several things about it, most informative being at the pathname site. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the actual use of it though, how is it different from /usr/local? Is it even used in slackware besides kde? Maybe I am just missing what is being meant by add-on packages.

Here are two of the layouts which I kinda like:

I'm not really sure if I should use the entire second disk for /home. 200 GB seems like an awfull lot of space for it, especially considering that noone else will be using this system.

Here is the second one:

The idea of using the older 80 GB for backups does seem appealing, so this is basicly what I'm leaning towards.
If anyone could offer some advice on this or a more sensible scheme it would be really nice, right now it seems like an allright strategy but I'm not sure yet if I should divide my system up more or if there is maybe a better way of doing things.

thanks.

I would recommend leaving a goodly portion unused so you can be flexible with your layout.

here's my suggestion:

if you have no need for a playground partition (like for trying-out other distros, etc.) then my suggestion would be:

unless you have some technical need for making separate partitions for /boot, /home, /var, etc, there's really no reason to do it...

BTW, remember that the size you should use for a swap partition depends on the amount of RAM you have and the type of programs you will be running...

here's another idea if you really wanna separate your /home and your /:

so basically you'd have 20 gigs exclusively dedicated to your software and 179 gigs dedicated to your documents... personally, i wouldn't do it like that on my PC, i'd just make one huge / partition and a small partition to play with (as in my first example)...

I recommend you this layout:

For the first harddisc (80GB)

/ root 5-7 GB (full installation I think)
/swap 512 Mb (I think will be enough)
/var 20 GB
/home about 55 GB (rest of it)

For the second harddisc
/mnt/playground (music,movies,other stuff)

I agree with win32sux, its great having a play partition when you just have to install another linux to see what its like! I have a separate partition for my /home I have made it 25gb. Its wicked I have just been saving all my packages and everything there. When I did my recent slackware upgrade I just wiped 10.1 and re-installed and mounted my home partition and I had everything back how I had it before pretty much... all my configs and everything

Just my

Its up to personal preference

***I guess someone else posted at the same time *************

Well, that certainly makes things a lot more simple *throws his layout in the bitbucket*. At the very least I'd be making a /home I think, for my personal sanity if anything .

I read a lot of articles where they recommend seperating /boot, /usr, /tmp, /you/name/it and are defending with all kinds of arguements why their system works better then system x or y. Also a lot of times I have read that a large / is not beneficial and might lengthen search operations among other things I can't (want to) remember.

This partitioning deal is all way too subjective methinks

In the end it probably depends on what you'll be using your system for, mine being a desktop system it will probably not need anything too complex. So these minimal layouts suggested seem like good options... that is, until someone else convinces me otherwise. *shakes fist at the linux community*

It' s really quite simple if you need to use seperate partitions for these directory's or not:

If you don't know why you should do it, then don't
If you do know, then do it

If your running a dual boot with windows you can have a fat32 partition so anything you download through linux you can save it to the fat32 drive and access it in windows.

bzzzzt!!! wrong thread.

The truth is, you can use just a single / partition and a /swap and everything will be just fine. I have mine split up due to small drive sizes, but on a huge drive it really isn't a must, although having /home seperate can be nice.

It's always nice to have some spare space for testing new distros and such.