Partitioning for Debian

[Bleep]

I have been using Red Hat for a little while now and want to change to Debian. I need some advice on partitioning a 20 gig hard drive for a install, can I do with 3 partitions? Not a dual boot, a stand alone system.

Bleep

 

[n0cmonkey]

/
swap
/home

 

[Bleep]

Size of the partitions?

Bleep

 

[stash]

Anywhere from 10-32 Megs for /boot, I usually do 512 Megs for swap, but you may want to fiddle depending on your memory, and the rest for /

Edit: Forgot that /home was listed. Split the remainder after /boot and swap between / and /home.

 

[pitupepito2000]

I am currently using Debian and this is how I would suggest you to partition your hard drive:
/
swap

You only these two partitions I don't really see any benefit from having the other partitions.

I hope this helps,
pitupepito

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I have:

512MB /
4GB /usr
768MB /var
50+GB /home

/ is at 24% usage, /usr is at 34% usage, /var is at 54% usage. I have a decent amount of stuff installed and only 1.2GB of /usr used, so honestly I'd say 2 or 3GB should be more than enough for /usr. 768MB seems like a good number for /var, but I suppose that depends. / really only needs probably a couple hundred MB.

Or you could follow others' advice and just make / and /home, or not even make a /home partition.

 

[Nighthawk69]

Having /home in a separate partition can allow you to reinstall the OS easier without having to shuffle fixes around and back them up (that includes all your settings for all apps too, which would come right back with /home intact) and it would also allow you to keep the users from filling the HDD with personal files.

The size of /home really depends on what you're keeping there. Personally, I have a symlink in my home dir to a directory on my fileserver where I keep all my personal files so my /home/tim dir is pretty small, actually, and I'm the only user on this PC. So for me, I'd use something like 2GB for /home, then a 512 MB swap file (since I don't think I've ever seen Linux use my swap file really ANY that I can remember with 512MB DDR) and then give the rest of that to / .

Those are just my thoughts. Everyone does things differently... I know some people who use a ton of partitions to keep different operations under control, but it just depends on what you're doing.

Good luck!

 

[Nothinman]

I usually only do / swap and /home, make / about 6G, swap 1G or so and the rest for /home. I prefer to put /home on a seperate drive but that's up to you.

 

[Nighthawk69]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I usually only do / swap and /home, make / about 6G, swap 1G or so and the rest for /home.

That's probably the way to go if you keep your personal files (MP3's, videos, etc.) on your desktop PC.

Why do you put /home on a separate HDD? Something to do with performance...?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Nighthawk69

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I usually only do / swap and /home, make / about 6G, swap 1G or so and the rest for /home.

That's probably the way to go if you keep your personal files (MP3's, videos, etc.) on your desktop PC.

Why do you put /home on a separate HDD? Something to do with performance...?

Can't speak for Nothinman, but it's just generally just simpler to keep your data seperate from the os. You can take your /home drive out, chuck your computer into a vat of acid, put your drive into another computer, install some stuff, and it'll be pretty much the same.

 

[Nothinman]

Why do you put /home on a separate HDD? Something to do with performance...?

Reliabilty, if the drive containing your root fs goes that can be reinstalled, if you have data in your home directory and it's on the same drive that's a bit nastier. And if you really want you can share /home between distros, installs, etc.

 

[Bleep]

Thanks a ton guys I appriciate all the information.

Bleep