Ubuntu partitioning?

[QueBert]

I Googled this and saw a lot of crap from 06-07. I'm installing Ubuntu 9.10 and seems every link I read said something different as to what to do when it comes to partitioning.

I'll probably be dual booting Ubuntu & Windows 7, right now I'm thinking

/boot partition 500 megs
/ partition 15 gigs
/home partition 10 gigs
/swap 1 gig at the end of the HD (8 gigs memory)
all ext4.

Are there any negatives to having a /home, it seems most guides just say to create a /boot / & /swap. I don't see why I wouldn't want a /home.

 

[Nothinman]

Separating /home is generally a good idea because you can then blow away all the others and keep your profile and any data in it. The only negative would be the same as with any partition, if you make it too small and fill it up it's a PITA to shuffle partitons around to give it more space.

And there's no such thing as /swap, it's just a swap partition with it's own layout so it won't be ext4 either.

 

[lxskllr]

I'd do 15gb / 1gb swap, and the rest to /home

 

[QueBert]

lxskillr - that's exactly what I did, had some problems getting GRUB to play nice with my Win 7 but all seems well now. I would imagine 10 gigs to home is plenty, all my mp3/video is on a different HD which I just mount. Hopefully I won't run out of space down the road though lol.

 

[lxskllr]

Well, maybe you can drop 7 sometime in the future to get more space. You don't seem that happy with Windows anyway :^)

 

[Colt45]

it's nice to have /var separate, in case some logger goes nuts.

 

[MrColin]

The scheme that I would follow with only 26GB is:
/ 10GB physical, including the following logical partitions inside.
/var 2GB (logical)
/boot 1GB (logical)
swap 2GB I may be mistaken on this point but if hibernation works on your machine and you plan to use it, swap should have enough room for the contents of your RAM. I've had 8GB of ram since 8.10 was released and have never seen ubuntu use more than 1.7GB except when running virtualbox or mounted a tmpfs in it. That is except when something goes horribly wrong, ie attempting a 30k record mail merge with openoffice.

/home The remainder of the drive, for me its the most important and the biggest.

I think you can only have 4 physical partitions total so for more than that you can create additional logical partitions. This scheme would leave room for a windows partition too.

 

[Nothinman]

The scheme that I would follow with only 26GB is:
/ 10GB physical, including the following logical partitions inside.
/var 2GB (logical)
/boot 1GB (logical)
swap 2GB I may be mistaken on this point but if hibernation works on your machine and you plan to use it, swap should have enough room for the contents of your RAM. I've had 8GB of ram since 8.10 was released and have never seen ubuntu use more than 1.7GB except when running virtualbox or mounted a tmpfs in it. That is except when something goes horribly wrong, ie attempting a 30k record mail merge with openoffice.

/home The remainder of the drive, for me its the most important and the biggest.

I think you can only have 4 physical partitions total so for more than that you can create additional logical partitions. This scheme would leave room for a windows partition too.

I don't get why everyone says to put /var on a separate partition. Potentially filling up / isn't a big concern and having /var fill up will likely cause more issues since logging, pid files, mail spool, etc all go there and will break if /var fills up.

And I really wish Ubuntu would have defaulted to LVM a long time ago. It would've made their fstab device name migration a lot simpler and saved people a lot of upgrade headaches. You only really need 2 partitions, one for /boot and one for LVM. From that LVM partition you can create as many volumes as you'd like. Sure, Windows won't be able to read those volumes but most people setup a second drive for sharing data anyway.

 

[JD50]

I agree with Nothinman, use LVM.