slackware partitioning question

[Chaoticknight16]

I have norton partition magic and it has a wizard for setting up your computer to boot with to operating systems. i ran it and it sets up a primary partition for the linux and a swap partition. i've read other places that you want like other partitions /usr and /opt for example, what are these and do i need them?

also any thoughts on boot magic? good, not good? i know there's also programs like lilo

 

[drag]

Nope extra partitions are purely optional and usually a pain to deal with on a PC.

All you need is root and a swap.

The only one that I regularly make is /home/ and that is so that my user files can sit there during a reformat and reinstall of the OS in the root partition. But that's only because it's my personal taste.

Otherwise for security on a multiuser system you may want to setup a seperate /var and /tmp partitoin so that a nasty luser doesn't try to fill up the entire disk with ruffage.

The main reason you DON'T want to setup multiple partitions is because it makes it difficult to allocate disk space from one partition to another in case you need it. To get around that (and for other reasons) modern distros allow you to optionally setup Logical Volume Management (LVM) that you can use to dynamicly alocate space between seperate "partitions" and combine partitions from multiple harddrives to make bigger volumes (although you don't want to do that without extra reliability assurances like RAID arrays.)

But you don't need to worry about that stuff. A root and swap partition is all you need.