Hey guys,

New to Linux and I am looking at the different partitions that should be done when installing linux.

For instance for the /home partition - if users save files on their home directories does it automatically save it on the /home partition?

Also for the swap partition - I will have 2 Distros of Linux on my machine do I need to have seperate boot partitions or just one?

So far here is what I think I will be doing - let me know if this is good.

/boot (100MB)
/root (1GIG)
(Swap) (2 GIG)
/home (10 GIG)
/tmp (1 GIG)
/usr (5 GIG)
/var (1 GIG)

Is it a desktop system? If so, I typically do thisI've never needed a swap file larger than 512MB. My old Celeron 400MHz runs a minimal KDE desktop and still never uses swap, even though it only has 256MB RAM. I guess if you do heavy video editing or the like, you might need a bigger swap. But otherwise, you're probably wasting disk space.

In my limited experience, shareing a /home partition is a nightmare. You can get some weird things happening with config files in /home (like kde config files, etc) because the different distros might use different versions of the same program with slightly different format config files.

I install the first distro grub to the MBR and put the config files on the /boot partition. I install the 2nd distro grub to the / partition and chainload it with the first. This way, if you ever decide to nuke the first distro, the boot files are still there to let you chainload the second.

Anyway, just my ...

That sounds good -

Also I am reading about LVM's? Are they worth creating or just stick w/ the partitions?

I've never used LVM's, but read a bit about them. It sounds like they're good for large storage system (like a media partition for MythTV, music, videos, etc) since it makes it easy to grow your filesystem if you need more space. In my reading, my impression is that it can cause a lot of heartache recovering from a problem if the entire install is done on LVM.

So I guess my inclination if you wanted to try LVM would be to install the / and /boot partitions on standard partitions. Then if you wanted a large partition for media (or maybe like the large /shared partition I talked about), it would be okay to use that as LVM.

Thanks,

I will stick to partitions for now as I will not be doing any large file transfers.

Thanks for the help.

If the user names are unique, then sharing the /home partition will cause no problem. One potential problem either way you do it is with the common directory for the user between the two distros. You will want to make sure that the UID you use for your username is the same in both distro's. Red Hat and SuSE for example start at different numbers, 500 and 1000 respectively.

Thanks JS -

Do I want to make the UID the same for all users on both distro's?

Also - one servers - do they seperate the /home directory to another partition? I will be trained on servers when I start my new job which is about a month from now - however I am trying to get a head start.

Thanks again for the help!

Also one more question -

I know their can be 4 Primary partitions for the HD - so which partitions do you choose as primary and extended?

With linux, I don't think it matters. I usually put /boot, /swap, and one / on a primary and the rest in an extended partition.

For a SERVER, at WORK, I'd expect lots more seperate partitions than just /home. You will probably run into seperate partitions for:
...just to name a few. It depends on what your server is setup to do, and how many people and/or applications it supports. Many of these filesystems may well be remote, on a SAN, possibly using Veritos instead of LVM. You should expect some form of logical volume management.

Of course, my idea of a server at work may not match your idea of a server...

Thanks guys!

Hae - not sure - I guess I will find out when I get their. I thought they would separate more partitions as well.