Partition CHAOS!! HELP ME!!!
 

Hi
I have some URGENT questions about partitions.
PLEEEEEEEEEEEZ answer ALL my questions! People
here often skip many questions! I'm about to
partition my hdb so plz help me.

I want to partition hdb with Disk Partitioner
(which is on the PCLinux OS LIve CD). When creating
partitions, I am asked to fill in the following:

Size in MB -
Filesysyem type -
Mount type -

Please answer the following:

1) For swap,root partition & home, what should be
the filesystem type AND mount point?

In filesystem type, I get options: Linux native, Linux swap,
Journalised FS ReiserFS.

In mount type, I get options: /, /boot, /home, /mnt/windows,
/tmp, /user, /var, /var/ftp & /var/www

2) Please tell me what the above mount points mean & what they are for.

3) What is the use of var & tmp partitions??

4) When I created a swap partition assigning size in MB as 512 MB,
it still always showed me the size of swap to be 509 MB!
Is this an error or normal??

PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ PLEEEEEEEEEEEEZ answer ALL my questions in FULL, SUFFICIENT DETAIL.

THANKS A LOT!

Take care
Cool Blue

File systems are a matter of taste - usually, ReiserFS is good for performance with many small files.
Root is at /
Home is at /home
- and I am pretty sure that if you create a swap partition, the system will suggest a mount point automagically.
The Linux file structure is described here.

1) Swap doesn't need a mount point, root is / and home is /home.
Format swap as Linux Swap, and the rest as whatever you happen to like - Reiser's popular enough

2) Mount points are directories where the partition gets mounted. There are various reasons you might want them to be separate partitions instead of living on root. If you have several distros, for instance, having /home as a partition means you can mount it in both distro & access all your files from either distro.

3) If you don't know, then there probably isn't any. If you don't have a specific reason to create a partition, don't bother, IMHO.

4) Perfectly normal, it's a rounding thing.

Don't get too worried about partitioning. A root, home, and swap partition will be fine for most users.

One thing to consider is, don't feel you have to partition up the whole disc - I still have about 40GB of unformatted, unpartitioned disc space on my machine, simply because I've no need for that space. If I suddenly decide I need a new partition, then I can easily add one, no need to mess around with resizing.

In case you want to install another distribution later, you may want to consider the problems with recycling /home - as I commented here.