Need partition advice

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Raaben

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 23, 2005
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Ok, I have finally decided to give up Windows for Linux. Yay for me.

Anyhow, I am not quite sure how to partition my hard drive. I am going to use my computer as a regular desktop machine. I have one 120gb drive to work with. What partitions should I make and how big should they be?
 
Raaben said:
Ok, I have finally decided to give up Windows for Linux. Yay for me.

Anyhow, I am not quite sure how to partition my hard drive. I am going to use my computer as a regular desktop machine. I have one 120gb drive to work with. What partitions should I make and how big should they be?
Click to expand...

here is how I would do it.

50 MB for /boot
500 MB for / (root)
1.5 times the size of your memory for swap
500 MB for /tmp
500 MB for /var
let's say 10 gigs for /usr, but you could go bigger
same goes for /home
then leave the rest blank, you can always use it later
 
Just a few questions, since I am still a noob to Linux.

I have a gig of RAM, do I really need that much (1.5x) swap space? Also, why such a small root partition?
 
Very little goes on the root partition - only the bare essentials to bootstrap the rest of the system and a few other binaries. Also, the swap partition is like the pagefile in Windows - you need a large swap partition because the operating system will every no and then decide to page an entire application to disk, so you need to have enough room on the swap partition to support it.
 
performance gets really shitty if a system ever swaps something out. in the years i have run linux as my desktop computer, i don't think i have ever seen any swap being used. then again, i've had 1.5 gigs of ram for the past 2.5 years of that, but still. on the servers at work, 1 gig is our standard for swap, even with 8 gigs of ram in the box.

as for partitions, for desktop machines, i tend to only pull /home out of the root partition (and add extra custom partitions for apps i use which i know to use a significant amount of disk space, such as /var/www/html, i make a /music folder-partition, et cetera) and leave ~15 gigs for root. this comes after breaking off /var, /usr, /tmp and realizing i don't use my computer that way--the only parts i keep when i upgrade are home directories, web html directories and such. for servers--yes! i separate these so one app that hogs disk space won't bring the entire system to a screeching hault.

if in doubt!: use lvm so you can re-allocate disk space at a later time. if you do this, /boot must be a standard partition (non-lvm).
 
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