I am preparing to install Debian, and am trying to work out a partition scheme. Here is what I have so far:

1024MB Swap Partition
1024MB / Partition
256MB /tmp partition
5GB /var partition
5GB /usr Partition
3GB /usr/local partition
/home for rest of disk

1. Does anyone have any suggestions to my scheme?
2. I want to use the Reiser FS for my partitions. Does Debian handle filesystems for me? If not, can I just use mke2fs for everything? And also, do any partitions besides the swap need to be a certain FS?
3. Does Debian assist in mounting the hard drives, or do I have to specify mount points somewhere else?

Sorry for such basic questions. I want to use Debian for its package management features. Thanks in advanced for any replies.

What function/role is that machine going to have,
which servers/services will you be running?

I'd say that the size of /var could be way smaller
if all that ever happens is going to be "casual
logging" and should be bigger if you're going to
install an SQL database and or Apache on it :)

/tmp may be a bit undersized, depending on what
you're going to do (burn a CD on the fly?), and if e.g.
KDE and likes were to be installed in /opt you may
want / to be bigger...


Cheers,
Tink

Yeah, I guess the question is what you are doing and why you need a big /var...
It's not how I would do a system, but then I have different needs no doubt...

IMHO, I'd reduce the /var to about 1.5G and throw the rest into your /usr, and I'd get rid of the /usr/local and consolidate it to just a /usr partition. That and your /swap partition is pretty big. How much RAM do you have? The swap should be about 1.5 times the amount of RAM you're running. Also, what Tink said about your /tmp, I'd bump that up as well.

Your / partition seems a bnit small to me regardless of what you want to do, it doesn't give you ample room for expansion in the future.

That's a very interesting statement ... most old-school
Unix admins and security consultants would suggest
making root as small as possible ... if you actually have
a plenty big /opt, /usr, /usr/local and /var, and even took
the time to split out /boot and /etc you'd have VERY fine-
grained control ... one could (once the system runs smoothly)
do things like mounting /usr and /usr/local ro, and /home
noexec ...


Cheers,
Tink

I guess you are right in a way but 1gig 2 me just seems a bit restrictive. Anyway we don't know what the system is being used for so I my point of view maybe entirely inaccurate. As for splitting /etc/, I thought /etc/ was supposed to be always on the same partition as /. Just something I read for the Linux+ exam.

This is really just going to be a normal computer, used for gaming, programming, surfing the web, etc. Thanks for the input so far. I got pretty bored in class today and worked on the partition scheme a little. I had heard that root partitions normally don't need to be that big if you are partitioning off the drive, but I am going to increase it to 2.5GB just to be safe. I have 1024MB of RAM, and I am probably going to have a gig of swap space, but would it be safe to shrink it down to 768MB? I'll increase /tmp to 1 GB so I have more space to play around with. Since I won't need that much for /var, I am shrinking it down to 1.5GB, and taking away the /usr/local partition. I will have /USR be 6.5GB then, and will put the rest into home. Thanks for all the input.

Also, the last 2 questions I asked don't really apply anymore. I thought about using Gentoo Linux for a little bit, and thought it wouldn't be that bad. Looking through the handbook, the only thing that seemed mildly confusing to me was the USE flags, but I can probably figure them out by next week. Thanks for all the advice.

Well, looking at Gentoo, some changes need to be made. I'm increasing /usr to 6GB just to play it safe. I'm also going to create /opt to be 1.5GB, and I'm increasing /var to 3GB since Gentoo compiles everything in /var/tmp/portage.

For an ordinary use machine you should stick to / /home and some swap IMO... You can always add more later = like a /usr/local/games maybe

You probably wont need a swap partition then (can you get away with that, anyone?), but wouldn't hurt to have at least 256M just in case. I have 640M and Slack almost never uses the swap partition on my drive.

Again, that always depends :)

I've seen 8GB RAM machines with a use of 1GB for
swap, no sweat ... my notebook with 512MB never
swapped out more (or at least I never noticed) more
than ~ 100MB ... but again, mileage varies with use.

If you happened to have Gnome, run several instances
of Mozilla, maybe some chubby java application running
and having a few HUGE images loaded in gimp while
creating audio-CDs from MP3s on the fly and encoding
a DVD to AVI in the background ... :D


Cheers,
Tink