Yet another partitioning & mount point question
 

Hi guys,

I did some searching & reading prior to posting. Couldn't really find what I wanted to know. So please bear with me on this partitioning & mount point question again.

I know for the min., I just need 4 partitions, / (root), /home, /swap & /boot.

My question is, what about the rest of the mount points such as /opt, /usr, /var & others? Where will they be mounted onto? Do I need to manually create these mount points & alter my fstab according or it gets done automatically during installation?

Suppose I have a 30 GB partition dedicated for installation (with the rest of the space being used by Win2K), if I use automatic partitioning, will the partitioning be done on that 30 GB partition or elsewhere on the hard-drive?

Thanks!

Split that 30GB part into something along the lines of:
about 100MB or so for /boot
I'd give / about 8GB or so, but I'm a program-installing fool, so you might need less.
how many users will determine how big you make /home
SWAP is normally double your physical memory, you'd leave it free or make a swap with something like partition magic

/opt, /usr, /var and those others will show up as directories under your /
You can actually allow /home to live under / as a directory as well.

A minimalist way of going would be:
100MB to /boot
512MB to 1GB for SWAP (I usually give 2GB to SWAP on my systems, but that makes some folks cringe.)
the rest to / and let /home, /opt, /usr, /var, etc. take care of themselves in /

Which distro are you installing? (Sounds like RedHat/Fedora to me.)

OK cwlee

Really you only need one partition which is the ROOT partition known as the "/" partition (forward slash).

You are a windows user so you can think of / as C:\ in Windows. Under / is all the directories and files.

Now linux does not have drives like windows has, so instead of having drive letters like C, D, E etc, you do what is called a mount under the / filesystem. So when you want to access the CD drive you would mount it under /mnt/cdrom. If you wanted to mount your windows drive you might mount it under /mnt/windows.

You can tell the system to mount other partitions like the /opt partition and the /home partition, this may be useful in a networked environment where each user has a different /home parition such that it is mounted from the server to show only their files.

Basically don't worry about partitioning everything. On my system I have a / partition a /boot partition and a swap partition. I think having the /boot on a seperate drive helps with security but not sure. The swap partition can be thought of as Virtual Memory in Windows. When ytour computer uses up all its RAM it will start using swap space instead. You will only use swap when your RAM is filled up with memory, If you have say 512 RAM it is unlikely that you will even need a swap partition.

Finally you can use automatic partitioning and it should not harm your WIN2K partition. I suggest you make you own partitioning though. With the 30 gig I would suggest

/boot TYPE= EXT3 100MB (I think the kernel is storred here)

SWAP Twice the amount of RAM on the system (so if you had 64 ram you would set this as 128MB)


/ TYPE= EXT3 The rest of the available memory out of the 30GIG (This will be where most of the files are storred)

Thanks for the replies. My main concerns were actually whether do I need to have partitions for /usr, /opt, /var, etc. And since they'll appear according, I guess its time for me to clear up my partition space & install Fedora Core 3 later when I'm home!

Once again, thanks for the replies :D