Fedora Core 17 - Partitioning sizing to test other linux as well
 

Hello,

I am about to install Fedora 17 as my main system, onto a 500GB disk. I would like to be able to test other linux distributions as well, so I was wondering what partition sizes would be recommended?

I have also heard that a boot partition of 1.5 - 2.0 GB is a good idea, - that sounds huge, just wondering why so large?

I look forward to your replies.

Hi,

I have a /boot partition of 500Mb which is more then enough. Besides that I have a / (root) of 50Gb and two LVM partitions, one for /home and one for /data so I can resize them when needed. Basically you can put everything in the / partition if you only are going to test, but I'm in favor of setting up some LVM partitions for 'critical' stuff.

Kind regards,

Eric

Pre-upgrade can be an issue these days with Fedora - they use the boot partition as a workspace.
Make it on the big side - it will be a mongrel to fix later. Especially if you happen to have LVM in the way.

Oh, and plan on using predominantly logical partitions if planning on playing with multiple distros.

Ok thanks guys for your replies.

I was wondering how much space to allocate for various partitions?

My guess so far is :

/boot 2 GB - I have plenty of room and this saves changing it later
/ 334 GB - fedora17 the main system
/TestOS 50 GB - For testing other distros
/home 50 GB - Only 1 user have only used 1 GB on existing system
/swap 64 GB - I have 8GB ram now, so this allows for mem upgrade to 32GB

If I was going to have a partition just for software, would it be in /opt or /usr? Would say 150GB be about right for my situation? Or should I not bother?

I am likely to have more software than data, as I routinely take data off to BluRay discs, especially multimedia. This is becoming much more important, because Australia is getting a NAtional Broadband Network (NBN) which is fibre-optic to each home & business. The NBN is reportedly going to have 100 times more bandwidth than ADSL2+.

Any way I look forward to any more thoughts, your help is appreciated.

Hi worzel1968,
I have 64GB for my / partition, having on it apt-cacher-ng (a Debian-Ubuntu packages cache) and alot much more programs and system languages than I really need. It will NEVER be filled up. So giving 340GB to it, in my opinion, is a lot much more than what will never be needed.

For programs outside distribution (manually installed programs) I think it's better to put them at /opt. You can make it an extra partition and give to it part of the 340GB of / if you think it can help you in any way (maybe sharing external programs with TestOS distro).

Kind regards,
emi

Hi Emi, Thanks for your reply.

I had 334GB for root because it was the remainder of the disk space. (500GB total).

The programs I had in mind were those that normally come with the distro, like KDevelop, Qt etc. I am thinking about buying BrisCAD, and downloading the source code & executable from another CAD package. Is it tricky to install the normal distro software in /opt ? If it is then maybe I might be better to leave them all in / ?

Thanks for your help.

Hi again,
Almost all major distros have their own packaging/apps system. These normally install programs directly on / (/usr, /{s,}bin, /etc, ...). You don't have the option to change this, unless you download the programs and install them manually (not recommended unless you need a special version of those programs).

For CAD apps, you should put them at /opt or /usr/local (I think the standard now is /opt). If these programs are very heavy, you can leave all the disk space to / or, as said, share an extra partition /opt between Fedora and TestOS. You choose.

See you,
emi

Emi,

Thanks for your explanation, I will have an /opt partition and put the CAD apps there.

Am marking this as solved.

The Fedora web site pre-upgrade docs list a workaround for low space /boot, basically boils down to filling /boot so second stage will D/L stuff instead of working out of /boot.


...or opt for virtualization if you're only playing with other distros?

:doh: ... yeah that too.... :D

I tend to be a bit old-school - I prefer dual-boot so I can run the system natively. Especially for benchmark or timing tests.
However, I did have to setup a RHEL 6.3 test system with KVM and some guests. Hmmm - food for investigation to see how things have developed of late.

Thanks guys for your replies.

I have it installed now, but now have a problem with getting rid of gnome - see my thread in fedora forum on LQ.