If I am planning on creating seperate partitions for /, /usr, and /home, am I correct in assuming that the root partition will not need to be very large (since /usr will hold all my programs)? What is a good size for a root partition? If it matters Im installing slackware.




Regards

hmm. It kinda depends on what you use. i use suse 9.1 and have tons of things installed
my /usr takes up 2.1 gigs but its in my / which is 10 gigs and 7.5 gigs used. my home folders are a seperate partition. my guess is slackware will be lighter than suse.

That's because you only have two partitions. Root's partition doesn't need to be large, but you'll have to put some thought into your partition scheme. Mine looks like...
Filesystem -----Size-----Used----Avail -----Used%---- Mounted on
/dev/hda8 ----- 2.8G ----- 107M ----- 2.7G ----- 4% ---- /
/dev/hda5 ----- 126M ----- 37M ----- 90M ----- 29% ---- /boot
/dev/hda6 ----- 4.7G ----- 49M ----- 4.7G ----- 2% ----/var
/dev/hda7 ----- 19G ----- 431M ----- 19G ----- 3% ---- /home
/dev/hda9 ----- 47G ----- 1.7G ----- 45G ----- 4% ---- /usr
/dev/hda10 ----- 957M ----- 33M ----- 925M ----- 4%---- /tmp
/dev/hda11----- 19G ----- 5.8G ----- 13G ----- 32% ---- /mp3
/dev/hda1 ----- 25G ----- 11G ----- 14G ----- 44% ---- /Windows

When choosing the / -partition size, remember that it will contain _everything_ that is not mounted elsewhere.

So, if you need lots of temporary disk space (DVD-burning for example), make sure you have /tmp on a separate partition or large / -partition. Otherwise you will run out of disk space.

Also if you have many users or lots of personal data, make the "/" large, or put "/home" on another partition. I've run into lots of troubles due to small "/".

It is however always possible to make symbolic links if you're running out of diskspace. For example, if "/" is filling up due to large "/tmp", you can link /tmp to /usr/tmp or whereever you find more space.

Thanks for the replies. I realized this is definitely something to expirement with. Ive got the root partition sitting pretty at 2 gigs, with everything else mounted elsewhere (/tmp, /var, /opt, /usr, /home)

One thing that I dont understand though, is whether or not all programs are by default installed in /usr. It seems that some of them install right in the folder with the src. So how do I direct a program to install in /usr if that is not the default? (put the src folder in /usr ?

IMO unless you know what sizes of partition you need, you are better just having / and /home (and swap)