i'm asking because i ran into this with rh 8, haven't touched in about a year and am about to install rh 9. i was using 100gig hard drive with 10 gigs for linux. upon one of the updates, i wasn't able to do it because i didn't have enough disc space. i didn't install anything after the initial install and deleted everything i had saved on it. that didn't do it. a friend explained that the problem was that i didn't partition enough space in the directory that the updatesd were trying to install in. so... is there either of good default way to partition or what space should i have as a good rule of thumb. i know thats a pretty tough question but if it helps any, the new hard drive will be 20 gigs..

For a n00b (nothing wrong with being a n00b, I'm a n00b with a gazillion posts) it's a good idea to just stick with putting all your eggs in 1 or 2 baskets. Create either 1 large / partition that everything will fall under (the entire 20GB will be usable by anything, very easy to work with, very simple) OR 1 large / partition and a second "data" partition for backups and whatever, split them around 15/5: 15GB for / and 5 GB for /mnt/data (the directory you'll allocate for the backups, name it what you want).

HTH

Cool

i second that. if you don't know that you need specific
space for something, then you don't and you'll just mess
up things trying to split it up. you might want to leave
250 megs for swap at the end, and make the rest root.