Partitioning for a Development Workstation / Desktop
 

Hello !

In about a week or so I will remove everything from my hard drive and "start fresh" . I plan on installing Gentoo Linux (Stage 1) and giving it the whole hard drive .

I have 40 GB of disk space and 128 MB of RAM .

The system I will be installing will be used as a Development Workstation but also for "normal user" activities (wich basically consist of connecting to servers [http/mail/ftp/ssh etc.] + music + a bit of playing around with Gimp .. no games, no *Open Office* and similar ..) .

Now .. I've read a lot of tutorials about partitioning your hard drive .. while they explain what and why , they don't explain how big . That's my problem ... I know what partitions I wish to create :

• /
• /home
• /usr
• /var
• /tmp
• /boot
• swap

(not: I know I don't *need* all those partitions but that's how I would like my disk partitioned .. mostly for security reasons, convenience for back-up, upgrading etc. ; right now I have only a swap and / partition .. but like I said .. I want to change and those are the partitions I want .. :) )

Now .. like I've mentioned earlyer I have 128 MB of RAM .. so I figured I should make the Swap partition 256 MB .. The Gentoo Handbook sais the Boot partition should be 32 MB so the /boot partition will have 32 MB

The problem is .. except for the partitions above .. I have no idea what sizes the rest of the partitions should have ..
Just how big does / have to be if /home, /usr, /var, /tmp and /boot are separate from it ? Not very big I'd assume ?

Now .. I was thinking of something like this:
I don't know if USR is too big or too small .. all I know is that right now I don't really believe I need any more software installed (I might be wrong of course) .. my TOTAL disk usage is 5.1 GB .. I've been having this system for about 3 months .. I have no idea how big /tmp should be ..

I forgot to mention this .. the only server currently running on my system is SSHD (well .. sure I have X too but it accepts local connections only ..) . But it is possible I will be running a HTTPD/FTPD/EMAILD on it too .. (any of these, in any combination)

So anyway , it comes down to this:

#1 : Can anyone recommend a partitioning scheme for my requierments ? (I mean .. keeping the partitions [or removing/adding one/two] .. I mostly need recomendations on sizes and filesystems) .. reasons/explanations would be highly appreciated too ..
#2 : If you think my partitioning scheme is close to "the truth" .. please tell me what you have to object to it or why it is good in some ways etc. :)

Thank you for your attention !

p.s: if you don't feel like designing a partition that fits my needs , I would really appreciate the results of "cat /etc/fstab && df -h" ran on your box along with a description of what you are using your system for :) .. maybe I can "deduct" a good partitioning scheme :)

Thanks again !

This is for a full sarge install, openoffice, gimp, X, kde (no gnome). Lots of multimedia software, lots of internet software.
/backup is where I keep music collection and videos. And... backups, also.

bruno@frank:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 2.8G 1.1G 1.7G 40% /
/dev/hda6 56G 30G 27G 53% /backup
/dev/hda5 12G 6.3G 4.9G 57% /home
/dev/hda3 4.7G 1.6G 3.2G 34% /usr

I got surprised on how debian is economic. As you can see, / and /usr were overestimated at partitioning-time.

bruno@frank:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs notail 0 1
/dev/hda6 /backup reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/hda5 /home reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/hda3 /usr reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/hda1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom1 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

A few thoughts: use only one fs, unless you have a good reason not to. Keep it simple. Whether ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs, its personal, I guess.

You can speed things up by creating the swap as the first partition (hda1).
Maybe this can be a starting point:

/dev/hda1 swap 256MB primary swap
/dev/hda2 / 2-3 GB primary
/dev/hda3 /usr 2-4 GB primary
/dev/hda4 extended
/dev/hda5,6,7 ... the rest goes here, and you still have ~34GB out of 40GB, right?

I do not know anything Gentoo-specific.

I have always seen / at 250-500 mb
I am currently using only ~150 mb

If you intend to run many servers, you may need more than 256 mb swap.
For developpment, /tmp should be about 1Gb

This is a setup for a mail/MySQL server (not what you need)
This is a setup for a file server