Not sure on this partition scheme
 

I'm finally installing Slackware 11.0. I never separated my partitions but I've read that it's advantageous to separate /usr and /home.

I was going to create the following partitions on my 20 GB drive:

/boot 150 MB
/swap 512 MB
/home 10 GB
/usr 5 GB
/ left over space

Also, should these all be primary partitions?

Just want to make sure before I do anything. Thanks for reading this.

All 5 of them ????.
Not likely.

Never seen the need to do too much separation.

If you will be multi-booting several different distros, you might want /home & /usr separate, but I have never had to do that. My scheme has a separate 10 MB /boot partition so that I can use the same kernel to boot two different slackware partitions. (I boot into a very small console based partition to back up my main partition.) My main partition is 8 GB. It is that big because I have both KDE & Dropline Gnome installed, along with a lot of other programs. Then I have a separate data partition, of about 30 GB, which has all my data, plus all my CDs & several of my favorite DVDs ripped in there. I have the separate data partition because it makes it easier to back up. I have a computer on my network with a RAID1 array in it to which I mirror all my partitions.
Regards,
Bill

Your scheme is OK. Hard drives can only support 4 primary partitions though, so you might set up the first 3 as primary and the other 2 as logical

None of these have to be primary partitions.

You don't need a partition for boot and you should probably not create one unless you are thinking about running your root on JFS or XFS.

/swap is not a partition (swap is a partition, but it doesn't have mount point like /swap). The installer or you will do mkswap /dev/hdn when you are ready to use swap, and you should have already created a partition coded 82 with fdisk. I think for a 20G drive depending on your RAM, 512M may be excessive. How much RAM do you have and what speed processor are you running?

/usr is not necessary either; Linux doesn't really separate /usr and even /usr/local as cleanly as it might so you wind up with a lot of stuff that is just a toss-up where it goes. The goal here is to make a place for stuff you install that you don't need to wipe out when you reinstall. You will have your own preferences about how you like to do that after you run for a while and after you see where the Slackware packages get installed. To try to figure that out now is probably not going to work.

You could do something like

and if you are worried that you will compile a lot of custom apps and make your own packages and don't want to have to copy it all off somewhere when you (inevitably ;)) reinstall you could do something like

this means that /usr/local and /tmp and all your other directories will just grow as needed under the root directory (/) so you don't have to figure out what you need.

One thing I have learnt from partitioning schemes is that it's wise to have a spare primary partition in case you want to install another distro, some of which require it to be on a primary (like freebsd). If /home has its own partition, primary or logical, then it can be preserved between upgrades/reinstalls which might be useful. Otherwise just a /root and swap will do. My swap is 1gb (same as ram) which is probably way too big. I don't think I've ever used it.

Wow - thank you Randux for your detailed post, and thanks to you all for your suggestions.

To answer your question Randux, this is a laptop running at 1 GHz with 256 RAM. I read that swap is suppose to be double your RAM.

Maybe I'll just dump everything together since I'll be the only one using the computer. At least I have a general idea now.

Thanks all! :)

Well, swap is supposed to be a maximum of 2x your RAM. Really, you'll probably never use that much swap unless you deal with either very large images or use certain archiving or encryption programs. 1x your RAM will work just fine in nearly all cases. Of course, if you have space, 2x RAM is an option as well.

The old rule was like that but I don't think anybody has seen much swap usage for a while, based on reading the posts. I do notice that on fast processors with 512M my system doesn't swap while on slower ones (slower than yours) with more memory it does swap, go figure ;)

I think 256M will be enough.