Need help partitioning system
Hello all...
First off, I admit that I'm a newb to Linux. I've been doing much reading and have found that there is very limited documentation on partitioning your hard drive for a new system. I know there are partitions such as / , /swap, /usr, /usr/local, /var, /tmp, /boot, and /home. BUT how do I know which of these to make primary, which to make logical/extended, and in what order I should create them in. From what a few people have told me, /usr should be one of the largest partitions as this is where all of my static paths, binaries and symbolics links will be. They also said I should create a separate /usr/local for all software, etc. not installed by Debian. Finally, they said that normally the remaining space on the hard disk goes into /home. Is this information valid? I have a 60GB drive in my machine and here is how I was going to partition the drive if everything I have heard/read is correct: /boot - 32Mb /swap - 2Gb / - 1Gb extended (?) /usr - 30Gb /usr/local - 10Gb /var - 5Gb /tmp - 1Gb /home - remaining space I will be the only user on this system. This will be used as a workstation for personal use (normal desktop use, i.e. internet, email, office and productivity, maybe games), as well as development (programming - software and web), etc. I would appreciate any help. Thanks. |
Hello
How you partition your hard drive depends on how you are planning to use your machine? And since you are gonna use this machine for personal ordinary use, I suggest you that you increase the /home because there you will store all your files. welcome to the world of Linux :) |
First I'll caveat that there's very few wrong ways to do it and you'll find out what works best for you over time.
Basically, linux doesn't care if it is a primary or logical partition, but in general, it's good to make /boot a primary partition. In general, my advice to a Noob trying to partition is to do this Code:
/boot 100MB -- which is probably too much, but space is cheap If you're dual booting with windows, then the shared space should be FAT32, otherwise use a journaled filesystem like ext3 (which is the default on most distros). If you're interested in trying out a bunch of distros, you can leave more extra space at the end of the drive (like I said, about 5GB) to just fiddle. If you want to play with linux for a while, I would suggest downloading KNoppix. Then when you're ready to partition, you can either use a nice gui program on Knoppix called qtparted or just use the distro's partition tool (some are more intuitive than others). |
Thank you for the help...I will tinker around with this tonight when I get home from work.
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The next partition scheme I will use (because my current is not perfect) will be something like this:
/ : 7G . Take care that /root is on this partition. This depends on what you will use your machine for. /boot: 80M . I currently have 27 kernels inside and its not yet full... I'm not even sure I'll create this one anymore. /home: 5G . This depends on the number of users and what they do.. my movies and music stuffs don't stay here, see below /var: 1.5G. This is the minimum if you want to have no problem upgrading from one release to another (experimental->unstable, stable->unstable). THis was my mistake, only have 1G which is suffisient for 90% of upgrades. THis depends on the purpose of machine. If its a "normal server" you might want to keep a lot of logs. /xfs: 10G This is for my movies and stuffs |
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As has been stated above, you don't need lots of different partitions on a machine that is primarily used by one person, but I like to set mine up like a professional workstation because it helps me stay aware of where things are going. After a bunch of installs and experimentation, this is the scheme I've settled on. / 1 GB /swap .25 - .5 GB /tmp 1 GB /usr 5 GB /var 4 GB /home ... the rest This is my current df -h ... Suggests that I probably have /var oversized. Code:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on |
I happen to have a 120 GB disk, here's my partition scheme:
Code:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on Regards, Dutch Master |
just to add another option that some of us too lazy to worry....
i've been using linux for close on 15 yrs and i dont bother with more than 2 partitions now.... / and swap.... thats it... i have two distros like it and xp... so i have 1 drive with xp(ntfs)...swap...and / (mandriva) second drive has just ubuntu and a partition unused at the moment... you can be fancy or lazy...there are no rules in linux... thats what i like about it...you can make your own... |
Yes do it as you prefer, its a matter of taste.
Still for me the /var partition is very important. In case of crash, like disk corruption(never happened in 10/15 years) or human stupidity (still happens eh), first I can sometimes see what happended and more important, on debian system I can recreate a machine with the exact same packages installed. I suggest to think about it. Well for home, you still have your documents and such. /usr I use it only on servers to share things /tmp interesting to mount it as not-executable for security eventhough it partially resolves the problem. Do you have any other reason for having /tmp seperated? |
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It's 1 gig to make sure I can write cdr temporary images. I also go there to run a lot of programs there that I want to output files that exist already on other partitions that I don't want to take a chance might be overwritten, like netselect-apt. One of the few places on the system I can run rm -rf without a moment's hesitation. |
i've got a dual boot system , windows/kanotix on a 80 gb harddisk
so i have 3 partitions + swap windows = 12 gb kanotix = 12 gb swap = 1 gb data = 55 gb basically i try and store all my work in data, which is fat32. |
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