If I don't feel like putting unused space as LVM and not running more than one Linux distro, what should I do with the remaining excessive space?

I also do not want to install Windows 7 again, at least on this machine. I could hardly play any decent games afterall so I might as well ditch it for Linux ^^

Just because you feel that you wont use a bigger /home partition doesnt mean its 'unused' space.

Making a huge /swap, and /boot partition might make you feel like you've used some of your 'unused' space.....but why bother? You wont get any advantages from having oversized partitions, and it will actually hurt performance, even if its just a little bit.

Since when is 1GB "huge"? 1GB has been in the noise for the last 10 years...

What distros are you guys using? I have many different Fedoras installed right now, here's the current usage:

F12: 124MB /boot, 21GB /
F14: 63MB /boot, 8.4GB /
F15: 68MB /boot, 18GB /
F16: 139MB /boot, 8.1GB /

The F14 and F15 machines only have 100MB /boot partitions, so I've had to do quite a bit of maintenance to keep it under that. The F12 and F16 machines have 500MB+ /boot partitions, so I've just let them go, which is why they're twice the size.

The F12 and F15 machines are servers, with many 32/64 bit libraries, source, and compilers installed, hence the large /. The F14 and F16 machines are desktops with just the OS. All machines have a single DE (gnome) installed. None of these sizes include the /home partition.

He asked me what I would do, and I told him. Just because your usage is different doesn't mean either of them are right or wrong. It just means they're different.

Did you even read my original reply?

*typo corrected (needed to needing) in quoting myself, but not the original post.

The OP then moved it to 2GB /boot...which is huge IMO.

Plus, even you say that you are only using 139MB of /boot on your F16 install, even though you've 'let it go'. I'd say that 250MB would have been enough. But like I said, I dont use /boot much so I'm no expert.

250MB would probably be enough, but what's the point in dealing with "probably" or "maybe"? Like I said, 1GB has been in the noise for the last 10 years. The difference between 250MB and 1GB is 750MB, that's 0.11% of his drive space, it's meaningless.

I don't see anybody preaching for him to use tune2fs to reduce the reserved section of the drive to something more reasonable...default is 5%, that's 32GB. 32GB lost to a "reserved" section which can only be used by root when the drive fills up. Why does it need to be so large? Everybody is freaking out about him making the /boot partition a few hundred MB larger than should be necessary, or making swap a few GB larger than should be necessary, but nobody is mentioning the 32GB that are lost to reserved filesystem blocks?

1GB, 2GB, even 10GB is more or less meaningless when you're dealing with a 640GB drive. Why bother making a partition barely large enough to contain what it needs to contain, when making it just a little larger will ensure you never have a problem, at the expense of what, a few wasted GB? Who cares about a few GB in this day and age.

What's a "litle larger"? His partitions are massively larger not just a little larger.

I reinstalled Fedora as it wouldn't connect to Internet, but that didn't work. Now my Internet works though thanks to the command update-pciids

While reinstalling Fedora, though, I resized my partitions since you all thought they were massively oversized, and you are the linux pro's

How's this for a change:

/boot ~ 500MB
/ ~ 25GB
Swap ~ 4GB
/home ~ what's left

CrazyGuy, let me just say whatever floats your boat is ok by me. I'm no linux expert but I do agree with Cascade and his posts about wasting free space in response to yours. I just posted what works for me and explained my reasoning for it.

Having said that I have never needed a /boot and as I said before I find 2GB SWAP is plenty.

What do yuo mean by 'in the noise'?

Assuming what I think it means, I really doubt that people have been talkinga bout 1GB /boot for 10 years. I'd like to see an article from 10 years ago talking about 1GB /boot partitions (apart from 'future use').

Strawman.

When you are just dealing with space, thats a valid point. But HDDs arent just about space.

If yuo have 2gb /boot, 100GB / and 8GB swap, then /home, /home on will be slower than if it was closer to the beginning of the drive. When loading programs, etc. it will take longer, not just because of the slight speed difference, but also because the HDD heads need to travel further.

I've got my reasons for haing a smaller / (and your usage numbers for / agree with that). /sawp, who really needs more than RAM + a lite bit (and you dont even need that really) when you have 4GB of RAM? Also, its a laptop, so any tasks that do lead to swap usage isn't something I would run on a laptop given a choice.

I honestly wouldnt even bother with /boot. Just my opinion.

So, theoretically, I don't need a separate partition for /boot if I'm only running one distro? What if a kernel fails? Then I can reformat and install another kernel + grub files?

Look, I don't know much about Linux, but I'm learning. I'm simply snapping up what I've been reading from various guides. Some say, keep it simple, while others say otherwise. This one guide said that it's sufficient with having root on one partition, home on one and swap on another.

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You dont need /boot even if you are running multipule distros.

If you have a kernel failure, you just reboot and load a different kernel from your bootloader. It differs from distro to distro exactly how you are meant to update the kernel (if you are meant to update the kernel at all) and behaviours around that.

Worse case scenario is install the kernel and update the bootloader manually.

Most distros use GRUB/GRUB2, to manually update GRUB all you normally have to do is run 'update-grub'.

Unless you remove the old kernel from the system or the bootloader, the older kernel will stay bootable.

Instaling lots of kernels will take up space, I've had 500MB+ worth of kernels with the system I am using. But I get kernel updates all the time (debian 'sid' based distro), and that was with a lot of kernels installed. I was just too lazy to clean up for a while. Even though the distro I'm using has a handy 'remove old kernels' tool installed stock.

In signal processing, when a signal falls into the noise, you can't see it, it's gone. There are so many other sources of noise, that you can't tell the difference between the noise and your signal.

When referring to something being "in the noise" outside of the signal processing world, it means it's so small that it's irrelevant, nobody cares about it. More importantly, it means that there are so many other things going on that are random and larger than what you're talking about, that the object of interest is lost.

1GB on a 640GB drive means nothing, there are random processes running here and there that use far more space than that, store it for a while, they might free it, they might not. The point is that you'll never see the difference between having that 1GB and not, that's what I mean by it being "in the noise".

Why do you try to second guess the experts, the people who work on optimising Fedora? In most cases, you let the Fedora installer know you will use the entire drive, and leave it to Fedora. Logical Volume Managed systems use Ext4 which is a journalized system. With the system deciding on using lvm, your space use is shared between / and everything else. In other cases, just do a manual install by setting /home to a separate partition and let the installer do the rest.
Whether /home is on a partition or /home is within the lvm, on a single drive system, you can always back it up.