Hey.

I'm fairly new to Slackware, and the last time I used it I just had one partition. I've decided, after reading up on it a bit more, to seperate them.

I basically just want someone to reassure me that this scheme is okay for what I want; a workstation, but also a normal desktop for listening to mp3s, watching movies, every day stuff like that.

200M /boot
512M /swap
500M /
2.0G /var
2.0G /tmp
10.0G /usr
20.0G /home

that leaves me at least 4GB extra space. I've heard of GNU Parted, so if I go with this scheme or someone's edited version, yet I find I need something slightly different, I can remove/add extra space to different partitions quite easily?

Also, I'm not too sure what filesystems I should use. I've heard it's a good idea to use ext2 for /boot, and either ext3 or ReiserFS for the rest. In a lot of cases I've heard that ReiserFS outperforms ext3, but ext3 has it's advantages in terms of safety.

Anyway, any help that anyone can give me will be appreciated. I've used Linux before, but then stopped due to computer problems and lack of time. This time I'm determined to stick with it. The little I've see of it I've enjoyed much more than Windows, so I know I'll be happy with it.

Thanks.

If you want really flexible partitions then why dont you use something like LVM (I dont know if slack does this though)

As to fs types ReiserFS is supposed to outperform ext3 a lot and Ive been happily using Reiser on both my /boot and / prtitions (all my partitions in other words) for a while now.

I would partition your disk like this:

35M /boot (ext2)
512M /swap
10G / (ext3 or reiserfs)
rest /home (ext3 or reiserfs)

Changing size of a partition isn't that simple, so it's better to do it once but good. cfdisk is a good text tool to create and maintain partitions.
And there is a fresh thread about ext3 or reiserfs http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=434549

Mariusz

I had similar questions and there are many posts on the subject. I think for a desktop machine you should just have root, home, and swap (which can be shared among linuces). Anything else is just a management issue with very little benefit. Since a full Slackware install is reputed to be 3G? (or was it 2G?) 500M root is not enough. It isn't worth it to try to guess how much you're going to need. If you are an expert with a particular distro and you are building a server then it makes sense to break everything up to protect the system and manage it. But for a desktop you are better off letting the system manage everything under root and having a home partition to keep stuff in across installs.

Reiserfs is nice and while I thought I had a problem with it earlier, I can't prove it and nothing else has ever gone wrong. The only advantage to ext2 and ext3 these days is that you can share them to a limited extent with *BSD machines if you want. With Reiserfs, that isn't an option at the moment.

Parted (and QTParted- the GUI) is a nice tool but as some of the other guys pointed out, it's much better to plan ahead and not resize things or you can wind up with a very big mess. I used it to resize an NTFS partition while setting up my system for multibooting and it worked perfectly.

I always remind people about planning for *BSD when talking about partitioning because I didn't know about the restriction and wound up stuck. I had to do a lot of backing up and repartitioning and restoring to get *BSD to run because of it. *BSD wants to live in a physical (primary) partition. So if you might want to run *BSD, reserve a primary partition for it.

Thanks for the help guys.

How does this sound:
Again leaves me with at least 4GB extra memory. Should I leave that
4GB incase I do need to increase the size of a partition (pretty unlikely I know), or use it now?

A fair amount of people talk about having a /usr/local partition. Is it worth it?

have a look at slackbook 2.0(page 45). they recommend a good partitioning guide. In fact, i recommend any slackers reading that!

you could add those 4 GB to /usr if you pretend to install a lot of custom software or you could add them to /home that won't hurt

I'll add 2GB to / and 2GB to /usr

IMHO you don't need 100M for /boot. How many kernels do you want to have? Standard kernel 2.4.32 from Pat takes about 1,3M and when you are compiling it by yourself it will be smaller. 2.6 kernels are a bit larger, but again, most of people have 1 or 2 kernels and maybe third for testing.
And it is really better not to split partitions on a desktop machine. Except having /home of course, in case of a big system upgrade.
Good luck

Mariusz

totally agreed

For a 40G drive, that's a perfectly acceptable layout, and you still have 4G+ of unallocated space.

As for the file system, I'd strongly recommend a journaled system such as ext3 or reiserfs. Good luck with it and welcome to LQ

Everything is up and running now. Thanks for the help.

Late to the conversation but maybe it'll be helpful to someone else.

That seems an awful lot of messing about for a desktop system.

100M /boot (ext2)
512M /swap
5GB / (reiserfs)
10GB /usr (reiserfs)
20GB /home (reiserfs)

100Mb boot, fair enough. You're only EVER going to NEED to be able to store one kernel, one initrd and the associated files there. 100Mb is a little leeway and allows space for stuff like doing mkinitrd inside /boot. Doing it as ext2 means that you've got an easily-accessible filesystem there so things like lilo/grub etc. don't get confused by some exotic filesystem. If you didn't have a reiser root and you had a recent (i.e post-2000) BIOS I'd say fold boot into the root but that's just me.

Swap, on it's own partition, marvellous. Quite unlikely you'll ever need MORE swap, even if you upgrade RAM etc. That's fine.

Now, a 5Gb root sounds a lot but it's actually not. Bear in mind that stuff like KDE goes into /opt (currently hovering at about 1.6Gb on my drive) and a lot of programs use /var for spooling and all sorts, not to mention /tmp which some programs grossly misuse to do stuff like temporarily storing ISO images and the like.

Additionally, your logs are on there and unless you are careful about what you install and what log rotation you have, you can easily end up taking gigs of space just for logs. Programs tend not to insert logrotate entries for you and if you install something that generates a lot of messages, you could easily end up with gigs of logs accumulating over time.

I know, for instance, that some HTTP proxy utilities will, by stupid default, log every file they access to a log - that can easily hit hundreds of megs within weeks with heavy usage for just a single user. Then forget to rotate those logs properly or, better, rotate those logs over, say, four weeks... even 400Mb of proxy logs is not pretty. You can spend your time making sure that the logs are only as verbose as you need them but how much time will you want to be tweaking stuff like that on your main desktop system?

Then you have spooling - printing to a samba-share which spools to a local printer can use enormous amounts of diskspace depending on your config, especially if the print jobs themselves are large - samba can be set up to spool to a dir to put the data through to cups, cups spools to a dir to pipe the data through, e.g. ghostscript, and so on. Not pretty to have programs crash because you ran out of space on /tmp because you filled up /var/spool with a large print job. That doesn't mean you should set them up on seperate partitions, rather you should just take account of how much space they may need.

10Gb /usr sounds a lot but, again, isn't necessarily enough. I'd throw anything I had spare at that but for a desktop-only system, I'd fold usr into / and allocate at least as much as you have allocated for each of them and whatever's spare.

20Gb home is obviously completely dependent on your users (if it's not just you) and how much they usually store. That could be fine. For me, it'd be a disaster, but I have a lot of data (250Gb). Be warned also that if you intend to use something like Wine or Crossover, they are usually setup to store ALL your windows programs in your home dir. They *can* be setup to share the windows dir across all users by sitting somewhere else. If you're going to be using Wine, it's something to take notice of.

I don't want to be a prophet of doom and gloom, the system you have is more than adequate, but I'm not sure you're taking a lot of things into account. To prove that I'm not trying to just bring you down, I have a linux desktop that has 10Gb of / and 250Gb of /home, some swap and no other "software" partitions (just data partitions from older drives I've imported into the system).

It works perfectly but I occasionally struggle to get enough space for things on the root (as in once a year or less and then a quick clear of some massive files that have built up soon solves it). My system is very carefully managed but 9Gb of stuff is used at the moment on root and that's just Slackware 10.2 and the programs I need to do all my desktop stuff (which includes Office 2000 via Crossover and some other Windows apps and lots of Linux apps).

If I did it again, I'd consider *at least* 20Gb for my "all-in-one" / (including my carefully maintained log directory, every piece of software on the system etc.). I'd also set aside AT LEAST 20Gb (and probably nearly 40) for stuff like Slackware ISO images, official packages that are released after the ISO, stuff from Linuxpackages.net and source code for other software. I currently have those seperated from the root also and they provide a lovely rollback/version check/system backup for my system. I realise you don't have the luxury of that much disk space, but for you I'd personally go for 20-20... 20Gb /, 20Gb home.

As other posts have pointed out, you REALLY don't want to get into repartioning stuff later, it's a pain in the butt, especially if you don't have a lot of empty space to play with (occasionally you need to physically copy your data somewhere else so that a particular partition can be resized/moved safely). With 20/20, you only have two partitions to worry about (swap also but that's hardly ever going to need to move/be resized and can even be removed entirely and you'll still have a fully-functioning system).

If you buy a new hard disk in the future, you could just move home onto that and let root take all the disk (a simple resize into empty space). If you had a lot of paritions, you'd have to juggle so much about it would take ages.

Storage is my most precious commodity when I have some spare cash - I'd rather have another hard disk than the fastest CPU you could imagine. I commonly have four or five disks in my main Linux desktop, each as large as I could afford at the time of purchase.

I find that paritions are only really helpful where you really need to cut things up. Seperating / from your data is a damn good idea (I do it mainly by seperate drives rather than seperate partitions, though). Swap has to be seperate from both because swap partitions are faster than swap files on those partitions (especially so if you do something silly like put a swap file on a journalled filesystem). If you want to seperate /boot for technical reasons (e.g. you're using reiser on root, have a bios that won't boot past 1024 cylinders etc.) fair enough. Anything after that doesn't really provide you much of a security, management or time advantage for a home desktop.