Partitioning for Slackware.
 

Hi. I had slackware but it messed up with rsync but now I want to install it again.

It's just a single user system (me) and it will be used for both text editing, spreadsheets (office kind of stuff) and for multimedia.

I have an 80gig drive to install it on.

I was just wondering the best space to allocate to the /, /usr/ and /home partitions or whether I should just have one swap partition and the rest allocated for the system.

Any advice will be appreciated.

Cheers. :)

Opinions seem to be divided on the benefit of separate partitions. I had separate /, /temp, /var, /usr /swap and /home when I had Slackware. This was mainly because I had read that separate /var prevented buffer overflows, separate /temp helped prevent fragmentation and separate /usr and /home were just a "good thing". The problem is how much space to devote to each partition. I never was happy with my choices and so with my Debian system I just have /, /swap and /home. I reckon a separate /home makes for an easier re-install if necessary as your data is unaffected.

Hope this helps.

Shucks, Buck Wheat, I can't resist:

I used to bother with separate partitions but now it's just / and swap.
I backup $HOME and /usr/local and plan on a clean re-install if/when something bombs.

Excuse my ignorance, but why backup /usr/local/ ?

There's basically nothing in there but man pages.

:scratch:

I think I'm just gonna have swap and / partitions. I do have another disk that I can use as backup to store importants information on.

Cheers for your input. :)

Cheers for you input guys. :)

I'm just gonna have swap and / partitions. I have a seperate disk for backup purposes and to store important data on.

If you think there's a possibility that you might ever
hose your system again, and you store data on that drive
that you don't want to lose; or if you might someday want
to upgrade or change your OS, you really should make a
separate /home partition. If you do, then you can install
and mount the old /home without formatting it.

As for sizes, unless you're going to install a whole lot
of new apps, 5GB for / is probably more than enough. The
rest is up to you. I usually leave some free space on the
drive for 'just in case' situations.

Posted by Bruce Hill:
100% agreement

Me too. I've never come even close to filling a hard drive. I also used to have a 4Gb Fat32 partition that I used for files I wanted to access in both Windoze and Linux. It was quite handy back when I still used Windoze fairly often.

I like separate partitions for the simple safety net. Partitioning will not save me from a hard drive failure, but is helpful in avoiding software problems. Partitioning is helpful when reinstalling software because certain files and data need not be recreated from scratch. This is most noticeable with user files in the /home partition.

I was partitioning my hard drive almost two decades ago with MS-DOS, dividing the hard drive into a C: (system), D: (applications), and E: (data). I still use that basic approach today with Windows (a couple of registry tweaks are necessary). As Windows became more prone to viruses and Trojan horses, my approach relieved some worry because those kinds of programs almost always attack system files and not application or data files. In any such related emergency I would need only reinstall system files and not the entire hard drive. GNU/Linux systems, with their file system approach toward everything on the system, allows for easy file and data segregation, not to mention that file permissions and rights play a significant role too.

On my second box with a 40GB hard drive, I created an 8 GB /home partition. Because I am not into videos or mp3 files, I likely will never fill this space. However, because of the large partition size, I installed Slackware CDs 1 and 2 to that partition in a directory called public. I need not grab CDs or mount ISO images to reinstall software. I also use that partition as user space for compiling software. I created a user group called compilers and created a special directory called builds. I need not "infect" any area of my hard drive with compiling tasks.

I also enjoy using separate /opt and /usr/local partitions because when I tinker or perform a reinstallation, I need not reinstall those files.

A shared FAT32 partition is handy for people who need to work in a dual Windows-GNU/Linux environment and do not have networking to share files.

For people who are into videos or mp3 files, creating a separate partition to house those files, and through fstab mounting those partitions as user directories in the /home file system, would seem like a smart strategy. Those partitions need not get walloped upon any system reinstallation and for backup purposes makes things a lot easier too. With the size of today's hard drives being so large and relatively inexpensive, creating a large partition to store those files should be straightforward.

Partitioning is part personal opinion and part risk vs. benefit. Users must decide what will work best for them and usually the advice of others is limited. Some personal experimentation usually is necessary before deciding upon any partitioning scheme.

Perhaps the following might help:

Hard Drive Partitioning

Not so on my boxes. :) I use /usr/local for storing all of my system wav and ogg files (/usr/local/share/sounds), and True Type fonts (/usr/local/share/fonts). I also store all of my administrative scripts that I have written or downloaded in /usr/local/sbin and user scripts that I have written or downloaded in /usr/local/bin. If I was inclined to write man pages for these scripts I would store them there as well. I seldom tinker with other distros these days, but I still perform an occasional reinstall. Having these files in a separate partition saves me a lot of work and time.