partition tutorial?
 

Hi all.

Can someone please point me to a comprehensive, general tutorial/guide relating to partitions?

(I have any number of questions, and I would not presume to ask them all here. I need to know things like what partitions need to be created, how big should they be, where should they be mounted, how should they be mounted, what's optional, what's mandatory, etc etc.)

My installation guide (Ubuntu) gives only the most cursory treatment to partitions, but I'm sure something exists that will give the information I need without posting a hundred questions here. I know this must be commonly tread ground.

Thanks. :)

--jim

If you can watch some short videos see: "Dual-booting Windows and Linux the easy way (Linux.com videos)" at http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/20/1654251

Partitions are not nearly as complicated as implied by some of the discussions.

A partition is simply a segment of a drive--the size depends totally on what you want to put there. Windows defaults to simply filling the whole drive with one partition. This works, but make it harder to change things in the future.

My advice: At the beginning, ignore most of what you read on this subject. Do your first installations with a MAXIMUM of 3 partitions:
/ The root of the main filesystem tree--8-10GB
swap 1GB
OPTIONAL:
data (can be mounted as /home, or can be mounted or linked to /home/documents) Make this as big as you can afford, BUT

Leave empty space on the disk for future changes

If you provide some details--eg size of disk, are you dual-booting, how much data do you need to store, etc. we can give more specific input.

Thanks both of you for your help. Your answers were both helpful, and between them and this guide that I found ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...a_Linux_System ), I think I know what I need.

Pixellany, here's my situation: I am making probably my fifth attempt in the last ten years to set up a useful Linux box. I have installed Ubuntu 6.06 (though I think I'm going to change that to 6.10 soon) on an old computer that I cobbled together from spare parts.

I am familiar with partitions in general, but I am clueless about how one should smartly divide up a Linux system. (Well, I -was- clueless; your post and the afore-mentioned tutorial have helped remedy that.)

Unfortunately, because it's a spare-part machine, hard drive space is limited. I have a 10 gig drive and a 1 gig drive. Right now it's installed, but not divvied up the way I want, so I think I'm going to redo the whole thing. When I do, I will make the entire 1 gig drive into a swap partition. Then, because it's so small, I think I might just leave the entire 10 as one partition for everything else. I'd hate to get screwed down the road because I made /tmp or /opt too small.

So far, this is by far my most successful attempt to switch. Frankly, I would format my XP machine right now and install Ubuntu, but I custom built it for video editing, so I'm tied to some Windows software to be able to use all the fancy hardware I bought. :-/

Anyway, thanks again to both of you for your help. :)

--jim