Quick advice on setting partition size

[blazerazor]

I have two 80gig Hardrives. 1 is 20(os)/60(everything else) and the other drive is just for backing up my stuff.

So i have FEDORA core3 - 4cd's ready to go. And I just want a standard system setup on the 20gig partition. How should I set my Linux partitions?
10 for the os, 5 for swap, 5 other one??? shooting from the hip here.

btw, I did have windows on there. My install disk was is fubur'd from sitting in my computer tool bag having cat5clamps,solding irons and screw drives hanging around cd's was a bad idea. This is just a experiment till I can properally re-install my xp.

 

[n0cmonkey]

YOUR SIG IS HUGE. FIX IT.

Do you have 2.5-3GB of RAM? What are you planning on doing with the system?

/ - small, maybe 100MB
/boot - small, like 32MB
/usr - Pretty big since this is where programs probably get installed
/home - the biggest since this is where your files go
/var - decently sized (~2GB maybe)
/tmp - small to decently sized (~250MB-1GB) depending on use
swap - 1.5-2x physical ram

 

[blazerazor]

I have 512x2, + 256 Ram in my system. Im just going to surf and play music on this. This is my main and will either ditch this later or dual-boot so I can log time in WoW.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: blazerazor
I have 512x2, + 256 Ram in my system. Im just going to surf and play music on this. This is my main and will either ditch this later or dual-boot so I can log time in WoW.

That's 1.25GB of ram. You don't really need 5GB of swap, that's insanity.

 

[P0ldy]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
YOUR SIG IS HUGE. FIX IT.

Do you have 2.5-3GB of RAM? What are you planning on doing with the system?

/ - small, maybe 100MB
/boot - small, like 32MB
/usr - Pretty big since this is where programs probably get installed
/home - the biggest since this is where your files go
/var - decently sized (~2GB maybe)
/tmp - small to decently sized (~250MB-1GB) depending on use
swap - 1.5-2x physical ram

This is something I've been wondering about. The conventional wisdom is to keep as few partitions as possible to prevent hdd corruption and data loss. But, whenever it comes to Linux a lot of users partition out the tree structure you've just done. Why is this? Is the "conventional wisdom" for Windows installs that have much higher risk of fragmentation? Are the *nix filesystems advanced to the point where many partitions don't wear on the hdd? Understandably, I guess you could argue that things in /boot are rarely going to get written to anyway; is that the justification? I guess it also helps dirs like tmp and var from taking too much space away from other programs, but is there anything beyond these practical reasons?

There are other reasons I can think of (like multiple machines sharing the same libs and netmounting the partition) for other situations, but a single, personal use PC?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: P0ldy
This is something I've been wondering about. The conventional wisdom is to keep as few partitions as possible to prevent hdd corruption and data loss. But, whenever it comes to Linux a lot of users partition out the tree structure you've just done. Why is this? Is the "conventional wisdom" for Windows installs that have much higher risk of fragmentation? Are the *nix filesystems advanced to the point where many partitions don't wear on the hdd? Understandably, I guess you could argue that things in /boot are rarely going to get written to anyway; is that the justification? I guess it also helps dirs like tmp and var from taking too much space away from other programs, but is there anything beyond these practical reasons?

There are other reasons I can think of (like multiple machines sharing the same libs and netmounting the partition) for other situations, but a single, personal use PC?

If a filesystem dies, do you want it to take out everything or just a smaller subset?

If a filesystem fills up, do you want it to create an error, or cause a bunch of issues?

Depending on usage, having a memory file system mounted tmp or /var/tmp can speed things up.

On a home desktop this stuff probably doesn't matter a whole lot though. One big / is probably fine, and I even do it on one of my machines (4GB disk).

 

[Nothinman]

For general usage I just split off /home and any data drives I might have. On this machine I have /, /boot, /home and my data drives and the only reason /boot is there is for consistency since my other machines needed it at some point.

/usr - This is where 99% of the packages will be installed to, so it needs to be pretty big.
/var - This is where the Debian apt package cache sits so it's nice to have it be pretty big (I need to clean mine, it's currently 3.6G). I don't know where FC keeps theirs though.
/tmp - Splitting this off on a single user machine is largely a waste. If this gets filled sure it'll fill up / too, but who cares? It's not terribly hard to delete everything in /tmp if you need.

This is something I've been wondering about. The conventional wisdom is to keep as few partitions as possible to prevent hdd corruption and data loss

That's not true it at all, infact the opposite is probably true. If you have filesystem corruption and you only have one big filesystem you're screwed. But if I have 5 filesystems and one of them gets corrupted the other 4 will be fine (ignoring complete disk failure).

Is the "conventional wisdom" for Windows installs that have much higher risk of fragmentation? Are the *nix filesystems advanced to the point where many partitions don't wear on the hdd?

Windows filesystem drives are quite bad at reducing fragmentation, but I doubt the added wear on the drive will be noticable. Drives are rated to run for decades longer than you'll ever want to use them, if a drive is going to die it'll die no matter how many partitons you have IMO.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I like to keep /, /home, /media (for mp3s), /usr/local/games, and /swap on separate partitions. I could probably get away without /media and keep my music in /home instead, but the rest I won't change. I recently installed Mandriva 2006 and only formatted /, keeping the other partitions intact.

This saves me from creating all new settings for all my apps as well as keeping my games installed. All I had to do was create a symlink in my home directory and the previously installed games work without a reinstall (I sometimes reapply the last patch for games to also get them listed in menus).

Since you plan to reinstall XP, reserve your first partition on the primary drive for it. If you wish to share data between XP and FC, keep one shared partition formatted in FAT32 so both OSes can read and write without issues.