Can anyone offer a little advice on best practice for partition sizes?

I've installed Slack 9.1 on an old 233MHz laptop with a 4.3Gb hard drive and 160Mb RAM. I'd previously installed Mandrake 9.2, which set up three partitions: a swap partition of approximately 400Mb, with the rest being split into two roughly equal chunks. Rather than mess around with the partitions I just installed Slack over the top, using one partition for / and mounting one as /home.

It's all working well so far - it seems to boot and load programs faster than Mandrake. I've just tried to push the envelope a bit by installing OpenOffice.org, because I prefer the word processor to Abiword. Following the instructions on the OOo website, I get an error message saying there's not enough room to create the necessary directories in /temp to install the program.

So...

Given that I intend to use the laptop pretty much exclusively for word processing, would it make sense to have a larger root partition (more room for programs) at the expense of the /home partition (which is where I'll be saving all my scribblings)? Would it be simpler to have just two partitions - swap and root? As I have a fairly slow processor, would more swap space be beneficial? Is there a practical limit on swap space? Can I resize my partitions without losing data and/or having to reinstall?

The automatic choices made by the Mandrake installer have worked well enough so far, but... well, automatic configuration isn't very Slack, is it?

Any advice much appreciated.

How often do you reinstall Slackware? If its pretty often, I would still keep a seperate /home, as then you can keep your settings (well, the ones that are stored under /home, at least) between reinstalls.

Look at how much space is being used out of /home right now. I know 100MB is fine for me (On a one user system), but you might need more. My recommendation:

400MB Swap
200MB Home
Whatever else Root

I have sucessfully resized two ext3 partitions with parted utility without loose data, I have to said that I did backup before doing that.
If I were you I would make two partitions as you have limited drive size (for swap size limit I can't say, my maximum swap size was 2gb)

Hmm. Right now I tend to reinstall quite often because I'm still messing around with setups and like to start with a clean slate every now and then! Once I get a workable setup, I'll be leaving the laptop as is - no need to upgrade every few weeks if all I'm using is a word processor.

As you say though, a separate home partition would help protect data. The Beast ( as I call it ) doesn't have a CDRW or even a floppy drive, so backups will be tricky! (It does have a USB port though, so I s'pose I could get a pen drive doobrie and use it to transfer files to my main PC).

I think I have parted on a disk somewhere - I'll have to dig it out, I think.

Thanks guys!

I have loaded Slack on HD space as low as 2GB with OpenOffice. It is all in THE install as well as the PARTITION table.
Here is a good example for a "large" 4GB install.
1024 part for /
320 part for swap # "rule of thumb = twice your memory size"
500 part for a single your /home #if you plane to have lots of stuff to save go make it more
#### the remaining goes to /usr #/usr is where most all programs are stored and launched from (except KDE which is /opt)
The above will allow for a good sized /tmp for certain operation on the / portion and space to install other programs on /usr.

Note on OpenOffice. You should install it for "single user" if you are installing for that reason on a single user machine. If you install OO "network" you will end up with 2 very large OO directories wasting disk space badly (one in the default install location, one in the user /home). In single user mode I like to place OO in the user /home directory.

Is there any particular benefit in having a separate partition for /usr, as opposed to just enlarging the / partition at the expense of /home?

As for OpenOffice, I've just been following the instructions I grabbed off their website. ( Y'see? Someone who actually RTFM! Yay me.) I can't remember offhand whether it made specific mention of a single user install - I'm at work at the moment so I can't check it. (Naughty!) I'll have to check it later when I get home...

there are two big benefits of the modularized partition scheme (probably more).
1. system recovery
2. easy upgrading/reinstalling

however, there is a rather large downside to modularization: waste of space

i've found that when you have limited disk space (and are comfortable with linux, ie. you don't reinstall every other week) then just a 2 partition setup is nice, just / and swap. yes, this does mean that you lose everything in /home when you reinstall (unless you back up), but also means that you don't waste any space. suppose that you make your / partition 1.5 GB and 500 MB for swap and the other 2 GB on /home (for a 4GB disk). now, if you aren't using all the space on either of those two partitions, and need it for the other, you are out of luck. (though i have been somewhat successful with parted) whereas, if just one big / partition you only run out of space when your disk does.

in the end, it comes down to user choice. if you know that you will never use more than X MB on home, but definitely need X MB for home, then by all means, make a separate partition. it could save you some headaches if you run into trouble.

hope this helps.

a note to keefaz:

good lord man, what could you need with 2 GB of swap??? if this is a very high traffic server then disregard the following rant... i know the rule of thumb is double your ram, but assuming that your system has a gig of ram, how often does it actually use all that ram, much less need 2 GB more space? you must be running some seriously mem-intensive apps...

an answer to lyceum:
Well it was my first install of linux (redhat 9) last year and having an 60 gb HD and 1024 mb ram, I believed that swap has to be the twice of ram

well....now that you mention redhat......

if you were running kde, you might well have needed all that swap....

Lyceum - looks like the scenario you mention is exactly what has happened. The / partition is full but the /home partition is empty.

For ease of admin, a two partition setup would probably suit me just fine. Once I have my fave applications ( and maybe a couple of games! ) installed, and have reinstalled and configured CUPS, I don't intend to keep reinstalling - I want to use the laptop for mobile word processing exlusively, so once it all just works, there should be no real need to upgrade or reinstall. ( It doesn't even have net access, so there's no problem with security patches. )

Thanks all. I'll probably continue with my current setup until I'm comfortable with it, then scrub the lot and do a final install so I can start using the damn thing for writing instead of just tinkering with it.

I'll let you all know when I've written my first Slackware best-seller.

It really sort of comes down to what you are setting up.

As mentioned a 2-3 partition setup is fine for a single user type workstation. Where you have a /, a swap and/or a /home.

Advanced multi-partition tables/hardrives are for advanced services and servers where there may be in this example of part mount points for /, /tmp, /var, /usr, /home, /swap, /swap.
Very active Servers can quickly fill a / partition when you have the /var/log in it. /home on multi-user enviroments can get really large quickly.
Yes you can have multi-swaps...
I use less than half my memory size for swap. The reason being I have yet to see Slack use any swap even on my lowest memory machines running Xorg (128megs). This box with a gig NEVER uses swap..

Hi
this thread was just about "small" drives, and howto get most out of them.
But how should I partition my drive if i have almost unlimited amout of space (~160gb)?
I'd like my system to be stable of course, and I reinstall quite often (after f*cking up things for example).
So far I have a swap partition(1024mb twice my ram), / (5gb), and /home (5gb). I want to install several os on that drive, eg BSD, Unix, or other Linux distros.
What would you advice me to speed up things?
What about a seperate /boot, /usr, /opt, /var, /root ?
Which can be seperate, which can't, which should, which shouldn't?
I've read the setup readme, but I didn't find all the information I was looking for.

thanks in advance

Just keep in mind the partitions limit : 4 primary partitions, so if you want more partitions you have to use logical partitions. Say for example, 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition wich contains all other logical partitions.
And as Nichole_knc says, the benefit of separate partition like /var is to save disk place in servers cause the log files fill it (apache access logs for example), maybe you will find just have a separate /home partition for your use is fine (especially if you reinstall often)

umm, ok. how can I get behind the partition limit, and where can I find more information about it? Why is it like that?

thanks