I want to a drive where I'll save all my files, and stuff and do the software installation things

so which one will be it

/home /usr ?

and how much space should /root have ?

if you are going to make a new installation then make a partiting with the name of "/home"

where you can keep your user data.

in Linux there are two roots

one is /

and second is

/root


well the first one is main root directory. where all the things reside. and the second one

/root is the home directory for the root user.


I think you can keep 1.5 GB for your / directory depends if you don't have many logs

is the second /root necessary ?

/home as said previously is where all your user files and settings will go.
/ is the root of the filesystem where /root is just root's home directory
/usr is primarily where all the software will get installed system wide.
/var/log is where your logs go
/etc is where your configuration files will be
/boot is where your kernel images/configs should be including other stuff for booting
/tmp is where temporary files go

When you back up your machine I recommend backing up user directories under /home, /var/log, /etc, /boot (if you have custom kernels), and /root if you have anything important in there.

It is a good idea to create a separate partition for /home. How much space you need for / depends on how much you want to install, so that is hard to gauge.

Some people make separate partitions for /var, /boot, /usr, and /tmp, but it really boils down to your preferences/needs. On this system I only have / and /home because it is just a desktop system.

I will go with this method.
/ ,/home and swap

and I will do a full install

now how much do I need

?

for swap i'll be making a partition of 1gb (512 *2)

answer plz

I want to do a full install now how much ?

manz00r:

For a basic set-up:

/swap <--- 1 or 2 GBs

/ <--- 10 - 20 GBs

/home <--- the remainder of the space that you would like to allocate to your linux installation.

/boot <--- optional - don't bother with this if your dual booting windows

You can ask 100 people how to partition and you may receive 100 different answers. It is almost impossible to answer since nobody knows what you plan on doing with your box.

I personally use /boot, swap, /, and /home partitions on my 40 Gig drive

/boot ~132 Meg / ext2
swap ~1 Gig (1 - 2 times physical RAM, I have 512 Meg)
/ ~12 Gig / ext3
/home Remainder / ext3

I pretty much agree with slackass. If you are planning on /, swap, and /home partitions and have a fair amount of "personal" files ie: pictures, images, docs, etc.), a place to start (again this is for a 40 gig drive) might be:

swap 1 Gig
/ 12 Gig
/home 27 Gig

for me arnd 6-7 gb for / was enough. I also saw someone use a partition was /opt where he put all the jdk/jre/eclipse/kde4/etc. etc. softwares which took up a lot of space. (along with 1 for /home

When i was a newbie with Slackware i just followed Shilo's website (seems down atm: http://shilo.is-a-geek.com). I'm gonna copy/paste from the google cache:

I just go with sth like this:

swap - 2 GB
/ - 14 GB
/var - 1.5 GB
/tmp - 4.5 GB
/home - 3 GB

/data - the rest

I strongly suggest a /data partition for file storage. In my experience a /home partition for all your files can be tedious if you plan to try out different distros.

I mount the data partition in my home directory through. Makes saving anything in it very easy , nearly all apps have a home button but none usually have a "/" button.

the /swap sapce is double size of your RAM

Not necessarily. If you have more than about 1GB of RAM, you probably need only 512MB of swap. I happen to have 2GB of RAM in this machine & have never used swap. But of course it also depends on how memory intensive your applications are.
Regards,
Bill

agreed. Most people with a decent amount of RAM (>= 1GB) will find that they never use swap (unless using apps that specifically use swap even when plenty of RAM is available). 512MB is plenty then.

Even if your machine has less memory, you probably don't need a ton of swap. Simply run as many memory intensive apps all at once that you think you would ever use and see how much swap you're using.

So, setting swap to 2X the amount of memory is really only a guide.

For a full install of Slackware I recommend a minimum of 9GB for / This will give you room to add more software. Honestly, 15GB should be plenty of space for / unless you plan on adding a lot and want to keep disk usage low (which I recommend you try to keep it 70-75% or less). These recommendations are of course assuming that you are using a partition for / and another for /home.

The size needed for /home is really dependent on what you do with it (same as for all the others). For instance, since I compile a lot of software and have ISOs and bunches of docs my /home is actually bigger than /. I imagine that most Linux users that opt to have a /home partition would have it at least the same size as the / partition.