Alright. First, I'll start by saying this: After giving it some thought, I've decided to leave Windows 7, at least on this laptop. I hardly play any games anymore and wouldn't mind not being able to play either.

I installed Linux Fedora 16 yesterday and installed it on one partition, except for the swap partition. I have three more partitions on which Windows 7 and its recoveries lie. I have been googling for hours on end, literally, without really getting the answer I want and most guides I've found are outdated since a long time. I want to dedicate my entire640gb harddrive to Linux and make a fresh install to set the partitions correct.

I don't just want three partitions as is standard, no, I want the ones I could have use for. I don't want every folder in the filesystem in its own partition. I'd prefer having / on one, boot on one, home on one and maybe usr on one and of course swap on one.

I have 640gb to spare and my machine runs 4GB RAM, so maybe like this:

Swap = 8GB
Boot = 100MB
/ = 100GB
Home = 50GB
usr = 200GB maybe?
Do I need own partitions for tmp and var as well?
Maybe I need to save some GB's for LVM space to play around with?
Also, do all but swap go as ext4? What about primary/logical?
The sizes I wrote are what I think I could use, feel free to come with better suggestions.

Since I'll be wiping my harddrive clean, I wanna create as many partitions as I can possibly need for easier future installations. I have fedora burned as a LiveCD on a disk.

Sorry for being so demanding, it's just that I haven't found any good answers to all my questions.

Thanks in advance for any answers! Try to keep it simple

Allocate more for /boot, at least 500MB, otherwise you'll fill it up after updating your kernel just a few times

I wouldn't restrict yourself with so many partitions. I generally use one for boot and one for /, that's it. Most systems I build use a SSD for the OS and a RAID for the rest, in that case I'll throw 500GB for boot on the SSD, use the rest of the SSD for / (around 80GB), and then use the RAID for /home.

The question you need to ask yourself is what will you be using all of your space for (media, data, etc), and where are you going to want to put it.

I have no idea if I need only three partitions, six partitions or a million ones, I just want what would work best for a normal Linux user with 1 640GB SATA HDD.

Giving it more thought, I don't think I'd ever put anything in /. Music, videos and all other general downloads would probably go in their respective folders in the /home so that would be where almost all space would go. I may just as well give a full GB for the /boot partition.

Would you mind writing me a list of the partitions that would be enough for a user like me and the space I should allocate to it. Would I be okay with one partition for /boot, one for /, one for /home, one for swap and lastly some unallocated LVM memory? And I take it ext4 for all partitions except swap which has no "filesystem?"

Everybody is different, what I do is going to be completely different than what everybody else here does. Either way...

Where "-" means all remaining space

I don't use LVM

Thanks for the help! I will use what you recommend but make a 10gb swap file instead of 8gb

Keep in mind that you canonly have 4 primary partitions & 1 extended partition. If windows is already on the extended partition you'll have to install fedora within it's partition, because you only can have 1 extended partition.
You can however put your /boot on a seperate partition & create your logical partitions within the extended.

I apologize as I skipped or missed this part of your post.

No harm done

I'm already done with the installation since about 1h 'n 40 mins ago and it's going great. Feels awesome to have Fedora on one partition, and my data on another

Now that you have youur data on another partition it is quite easy to backup atleast your /home directory so as to always have a backup of your data. Congrats!

100GB /? What the hell? I've got a 6.5GB /, quite a few installed programs, and 2 different DEs (KDE + Xfce) and / isnt even that close to being filled. 10-15GB is as big as you would need in the vast majority of cases.

I dont normally use /boot, but 1GB seems really excessive as well. A few years ago 32-64MB /boot was more than enough for most users...I cant imaging needed more than 250MB.

8GB swap, that is again more than you would need. Its possible that 4GB RAM/8GB swap would be useful in very, very rare sitations, but 99.999% of the time its more swap than you would need with 4GB RAM..and in those rare sitations, adding more RAM would be a better idea than having an overszied swap. The biggest swap I would bother with if there is 4GB RAM would be 4.25GB-4.5GB.

I'd also put swap at the end of the drive...you dont want to be using swap at all most of the time, and the closer toward the beginning of the drive a partition is, the faster it is. IMO you a should put /boot, then / on the fastest part of the drive you can, not swap.

Why on earth would you do that?

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I never have more than 2GB SWAP and I very rarely get to use any of it with normal usage, the only time I really get into SWAP is when I'm running VirtualBox and thats because it sucks RAM like there's no tomorrow.

My setups are usally 10GB / 2 GB SWAP and the rest /home. Up until 2 days ago I had 5 DEs, and associated applications, in 1 10GB / partition and I still had nearly 2 GB to spare. When I reset this machine up I will probably give it 15GB just to make sure I have room to move but a normal user shouldn';t need more than 10GB /.

@Cascade, I think the 100GB may have been a typo, lol. At least I hope so. You taught me something, I always have my SWAP right after / and before /home. No particular reason for it it's just how I do it. I'll give it a whirl at the end this time and see if there is any noticable difference.

Wasn't a typo. I really have set my "/" partition to be a massive 100 GB. I have heard the "usr" directory can take up quite a bit of space and I wanna be on the safe side. I said I wanted to use my entire harddrive on this and I'm only going to have one linux distro at a time. I'll never fill out ~500gb worth of home space, but at least I have lots of empty space just in case.

Well I wanna be on the safe side. Just in case, you know.

To be honest, I set it up at 2gb.

I like to overkill

Swap is at the end. /boot in on the first cylinders, then /, then /home and lastly swap.

Felt like it.

That really is overkill. Why don't you cut it back to 15GB which will still give you plently of room to move and set up another distro (or 5) to learn with in the remaining space? Maybe even set up a testing distro so you can learn how Fedora develops their distro. I did that with Ubuntu for a few years and now I do with with Debian and Cobber.

Think of it this way it will give you a chance to not only learn but also to give back to the Linux community in general and Fedora more specifically.

Heh, cool.

No, moving /swap probably wont make much noticable difference to a normal user. Hard to pick the difference between 12MS and 10MS acess times (that is probably exageration anyway) or 80MB/sec from home and 82MB/sec (not exageration). You would see a some difference in benchmarking.

But I consider even (theoretically) unnoticable improvements worthwhile. There is a saying in drag racing- 'seconds are made of of lots of 100ths of seconds'.

Then your doing it wrong. You want 1TB for /boot, 2TB for / and as much as possible for /home, etc..

Joking aside, do you understand what swap is used for? 'Overkill' is not going to help you at all.

If you are only planning on using 1 distro at a time, 2GB /boot isnt going to help you either.

Neither will 100GB /root. I've never heard of ANYONE usign more than 20-25GB..and IIRC even that time / usage dropped back to less than 15GB when he user ran bleachbit (think of it as being a linux version of' ccleaner' if you know windwos programs well)