I wish to create several partitions on my PC as it's going to be shared by various family members. I opt for partitions (instead of using just several users and creating the corresponding number of homes), because it's much more secure for users so as not to touch the system and especially if the system goes down, their files are safe.

When I try to create partitions during installation I'm finding several problems with Ubuntu 9.10. I have to mount each partition on a particular point (and no point can be used for two different partitions). I know it has to be extended in order to create more partitions.

I tried to do just one big partition (besides that for swap and for the system) and then after installation tried to use gparted, but as the mounting point was home, it won't allow me to resize it or create new partitions.

When I put it in /boot it screwed up the booting file. Now the other alternatives are /tmp and /var ? (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hlight=gparted)

Any ideas? Thanks for your time and patience.

One partition per person?? That's really daft IMHO, just use a dedicated ext3 (or equiv) /home partition as you would and keep backups.

One partition per person?? That's really daft IMHO, just use a dedicated ext3 (or equiv) /home partition as you would and keep backups.


If I have understood well, the answer is to create several users. But some of the users use a large amount of space, hence their own home part would be full after some days.


Thanks for answering.

why would it be full?? A disk is only as big as it is, wether you carve it up into a dozen partitions or have a single one, it's still the same size in total, and using logical partitions to do this space allocation will only serve to restrict you. If you look at options like filesystem quota's or even maybe LVM volumes if you really really had to, you can allocate space much more elegantly.

Yes it's about space and security. A normal home partition for common users is very limited in space hence it would run into problems immediately if one has in mind of putting thousands of files.

A partition is recommended because, in poor words, it's as if one is dividing a hard disk into several ones.

But anyway I'm always open to new ideas. I shall look into the LVM. Where can I find good literature (if you don't mind) ?

why is space very limited?? There is as much space as you give to it.

So when creating several users, one can resize the home part?