SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
I would like to install Slackware and want to confirm that the following partition scheme looks appropriate.
I have 118 GB to spare:
Swap (4 GB) ---> I am considering not creating a swap partition (I have 6 GB of RAM - don't think it is necessary)
/boot (200 MB)
/ (25 GB)
/home (rest)
/usr (10 GB)
/var (10 GB)
/tmp (5GB)
Is this alright for a regular desktop environment with no special requirements - please feel free to suggest any changes. Thank you in advance.
On a normal desktop environment there is no need for having separate /usr, /tmp and /var, IMHO. A separate /boot is also not needed, except you want to use LVM or RAID for your /-partition.
Regarding swap, if you plan to use hibernate it should be at least as large as your physical RAM, otherwise I would give 1GB.
"It is also a good idea to make seperate partitions for /, /home, and /usr. ... There are many good reasons to breaking it up into /, /home, and /usr. For example: ... /usr is where software goes, so you can keep that whenever you upgrade distributions. ..."
So would this be an appropriate way to allocate 116 GB? (Like TobiSGD mentioned, I don't think I need to make it more complicated than it needs to be for my very modest needs in a normal desktop environment).
/ 25 GB
/var 16GB
/tmp (how big should this be? 5GB?)
/home (rest - ~70GB)
Seriously, on a normal desktop environment there is no need for /. C:\ is enough. ;-)
Posting in the wrong forum? Only one of my machines has a C:\ partition (although I prefer to tell it /dev/sda1, since in Windows drive letters are neither related to the disk they are on nor to the position they are on that disk).
You are right, allocating 175GB to the system and putting the rest to /home is the right way to do on a disk with 116GB space. Would you now like to elaborate why you think that would be reasonable on a desktop system?
Hmmm - a lot of contradicting opinions. I understand there is no "correct answer" and that it will largely depend on the individual needs of a user. Like I said though, I am only looking for what most would consider a normal partition scheme for regular desktop use. I don't have too much Linux experience, which is why I am not sure about some of the more technical aspects of space allocation. When people provide suggestions, could you please assume that I won't need any special scheme.
Based on the previous suggestions, I am now looking at something like this:
/ (15 GB)
/var (10 GB)
/usr (25 GB)
/tmp (I don't quite understand here if I use a temporary file system [tmpfs], if I still need to allocate space during the installation or if it will use my RAM?)
/home (rest ~66 GB)
partition 1 /boot .... 100 M (or more depending on your mood!)
partition 2 / ........ 16G with Slackware14
partition 3 swap = 2xram
partition 4 everything else
Then I make partition 4 a volume group and use LVM to create whatever
size logical volumes that I need. This way I can expand the volumes as needed.
I use ext3 for all my filesystems, and expanding the logical volume can handle expanding this filesystem type also.
This makes for a very flexible setup.
As it happens, my Thinkpad W530 has a relatively small (32G) msata SSD ... just show how things have changed over the last few years when 32G is considered small!) as well as a 500G spinning hard-drive.
I have partitoned the SSD into 2 equal 15+G partitions onto which I install the base OS (2 partitions gives me a non-destructive upgrade path).
My main spinning hard-drive contains my swap partition and the remainder which I use as a volume group. I have separate logical volumes for /usr/local, /home, /tmp and /var which means my SSD drive is pretty much read-only during normal operations.
Hmmm - a lot of contradicting opinions. I understand there is no "correct answer" and that it will largely depend on the individual needs of a user. Like I said though, I am only looking for what most would consider a normal partition scheme for regular desktop use. I don't have too much Linux experience, which is why I am not sure about some of the more technical aspects of space allocation. When people provide suggestions, could you please assume that I won't need any special scheme.
Based on the previous suggestions, I am now looking at something like this:
/ (15 GB)
/var (10 GB)
/usr (25 GB)
/tmp (I don't quite understand here if I use a temporary file system [tmpfs], if I still need to allocate space during the installation or if it will use my RAM?)
/home (rest ~66 GB)
Thanks for your help.
Yes, tmpfs will use your RAM instead of disk space. By the way, if you have a separate /usr, /var and /tmp (for what reason ever, I still think at least splitting out /usr and /var does not really make sense on a desktop machine) you won't need a 15GB /-partition.
Oh, and keep in mind that there will be no hibernation without swap partition, just in case you want to use it.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.