Well, this is my first post here, but certainly not the first post on the subject. After going through countless threads in countless forums, as well as countless articles on countless websites (eh, well...), I still don't know what to decide on, much because partition layout is quite system dependent. Also, I'm relatively new to Linux, so I don't have anything else than other peoples experience to rely on.

Anyway...here's the deal. I'm about to install Slackware 9 on a second hdd. Until I get a Mac, I'm forced to use Windows due to certain apps, so I'm going to have a dual boot setup. I did this a year ago, on another computer, but it's a bit different now for several reasons; the relevant one being that last time I had Slackware installed on a much smaller hdd (4 GB). This time, Slack is going to get a full 40 GB.

Now, this is my (preliminary) partitioning scheme:

/boot - 50 MB
swap - 1 GB (I have 1 GB of RAM)
/var - 2 GB
/tmp - 2 GB
/ - 4 GB
/usr - ?
/home - ?

I don't know how much space I should give /usr and /home. Usually, when a manufacturer says it's a 40 GB hdd, it's a 36 GB (or something), and with that in mind, the above layout would mean I have about 27 GB left for /usr and /home to feast on.

Suggestions?

well it depends what you want it for really, depending on how you use it you could need more space in /usr or more in /home, generally i'd say that the best place to put spare space would be /home though, so have say... 6gb usr the rest for home, with that much space for a general system though it's not going to cause any problems however it's split.

be aware that you don't need that many partitions (var is a good idea though... i've fallen over a number of times recently from my mailboxes getting full and crashing my system for varous reasons) and with a gig of ram you'll probably never use that swap at all... but it's clear thaat you're not short of space, so it won't really be missed it'd seem.

Here's a good question, is swap becoming that much of an issue anymore? The only system I have that uses any of the swap is my webserver. My other machines make use of the ram they have. Just not sure if swap is really an issue anymore in newer computers with a lot of ram. Anyone else have a comment?

Thanks for your input, acid_kewpie. About the swap...well, if the comp is intended for Joe Desktop, sure, there might be little use of a swap. On the other hand, if it's gonna be used for stuff like video or sound editing, some swap might come in handy. Also, even if one does not initially intend to run memory-intensive applications or the like, one never knows. Having a large enough swap from the beginning could at least save you from the hazzle/risk of resizing partitions in an existing system.

I have Red Hat 9 and about 3 GB of stuff in /usr. It is a 6 GB partition that is 51% full. I have 13 Mb in my 256 Mb /boot partition and only 237 Mb in my 4 Gb "/" partiton. I also have a separate partition with about 600 Mb in it where I store articles, documents and other miscellaneous stuff. The point of what I am saying is that for me the /usr partition ended needing the most space. I recently used Partition Magic to resize /usr from 3 GB to 6 GB. I may eventually use Partiton magic to reduce the size of "/" and "/boot". I installed nearly nearly everything except most of the server stuff. I used the df command to get the above size figures.

I have 3 copies of Linux installed on this computer and plan to add Slackware as my 4th distro. The partiton that I use to store my documents and other stuff, is a partition I use from all 3 copies of Linux. I made sure that have have the same user ID number in in all 3 copies of Linux so that I will have the correct priveleges in each for using that partition. I also use the same swap partition for all 3 distros and that seems to have worked out ok. If someone creates several different large partitons they my end up with not having much in some partitions. I wonder if it would be practical to use the same /home partition for all 4 copies of the copies of Linux on this computer? For that matter I wonder if my e-mail messages and browser bookmarks could somehow also be shared by all 4 Linux distros?