partition set up
 

I am tring to get ideas of the best way to have my partitions set up for best performance. Any ideas would be appreciated.

I'm pretty sure this depends on what you want to do with your machine... Even then, it's somewhat subjective.

Well after a few years of meddling and quite a number of disasters, I finally got pissed off with loosing everything, whenever I screwed up and couldn't work out how to recover stuff.

So I keep what I refer to as a "modified Gentoo default". When I tried gentoo, I initially tried a mandriva/mandrake/SuSE type (ish) default. Which meant that I could install everything onto just a single partition - which is why, if I screwed up and had to fall back on the "windowsesque idiot answer" of re-installing, lost everything.

That downside of that is obvious i.e. without backups, you loose all that precious and time consuming personal stuff like music, videos, address books etc etc.

Gentoo just didn't want to "wear" that. So I followed their instructions verbatim, using /boot, /swap and /, but modified by the addition of a separate /home. It soon became apparent to me, that if I did screw up, all I had to do was either re-install the system to the / partition or if I was going to try a new distro just put that on the / but to make sure that I didn't touch the /home.

It means that apart from when I installed the Kanotix I'm currently using, I've not lost anything - with this kanotix, I was just too impatient and didn't read the onscreen text during the install - well that doesn't matter now as I also have an external backup available - but I still try to maintain the same attitude.

I only have the 1 HDD, plus I haven't had a windows install for nearly 2 years on this "box".

I've got it partitioned up thus:

/boot = 1 gig (more than enough) formatted as ext3

/swap = 1.5 gigs (again, more than adequate, but using the older wisdom of having a swap of roughly twice the installed RAM of 786 megs)

/ = about 30 gigs, which allows for just about all the software I might ever want to install and loads of room for any log files that might build up over general usage (you could probably easily get away with 5 to 8 gigs in the same instance - It's just that I have the space so why not!). formatted as ext3.

/home = about 88 gigs. Formatted as ext3. So I can pile as much crap in there as I want i.e. music, video, address book(s), customisations/personalisations etc etc etc.

These are all "primary" partitions, though previously, when I still had windows installed, I had 1 partiton (primary) for windows (NTFS), then a second primary one formatted as FAT32 for my music and other "gubbins", the third being extended for linux into /, /swap and /home (this was before I tried gentoo which wanted a /boot as well).

Of course, if you know what takes up room in Linux, you can always do some serious tailoring and have it so that each of the main directories has it's own partition - you'd need to have a good working knowledge of what size to make the partitions though so that /boot, /swap, /, /home, /var, /tmp, /bin, /usr etc etc etc (ha! /anything really) has it's "own" disc space, but I suspect if you just want to do "normal" stuff, that might just seriously over complicate a system, not to mention the complexity of some of the main config files.

So hence, it's up to you.

good luck in your decisions

regards

John