Slackware partition scheme
 

Hello everyone,

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.

So would you recommend something like:

Swap: 6 GB (to allow possibility for hibernate)
Root: 30 GB
Home: 82 GB

Thank you for your assistance.

That seems reasonable, this allows enough space for installing a bunch of programs and having still enough space in /tmp.

Do you not think it would be appropriate to make a separate /usr partition?

Excerpt from the Slackware website (http://slackware.com/install/partitions.php)

"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. ..."

I think you're being a little over generous with the allocations.

I have 4GB ram, This is what I do (more or less):
/ 16GB
/var 16GB *
/tmp (in ram on tmpfs)
/home as big as needed.
no-swap

* 16GB /var so that you have plenty of space available for /var/tmp (for things that won't fit on the in RAM /tmp)

P.S.
I don't bother with a separate /usr any more. Ask yourself why you would want it to be separate, if you don't have a good answer, don't bother.

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)

/: 50 GB
swap: 25 GB
/usr/src: 100 GB
/home: the rest

Too much, 2-8 G is enough.
Way to small, for a regular Slackware install you should allocate a minimum of 24 GB for /usr.

Use a tmpfs for that.

On a rotating disk place /var behind / and before /usr.

Seriously, on a normal desktop environment there is no need for /. C:\ is enough. ;-)

As I said above, I have specific reasons for making /var that big. Don't just copy my values without thinking it through.

@GAZL ...How much RAM would you need/recommend before running /tmp in RAM?

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)

Thanks for your help.

Hey,
My 2 cents worth ....

With one hard-drive, I partition:-

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.

As usual YMMV :-)

cheers
pete

pete hilton
saruman@ruvolo-hilton.org
Running Slackware since 1995

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.