[SGVLUG] newbie qu: HDD partitions

[Claude Felizardo]

If it's not too late to respond to this ... 

also, i think this would be a great topic on the website where people
can add their comments, post their current configurations, etc.

On 7/29/05, Jeff Kutz <jdkutz_68 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Subj: newbie qu: HDD partitions
> 
> I am going to load Fedora on a Dell Latitude C600 (1 GHz) laptop for a
> dedicated Linux learn/play computer.  I am going with Fedora because it came
> with the book Red Hat Linux by Mark G Sobell.
> 
> My question is what would be the smartest way to partition the 20 GB hard
> drive.  The author talks about partitions but it seems more like
> subdirectories that he is talking about.  The way I read the book he would
> have me putting in some half-dozen partitions.  I am coming from the
> DOS/Windows world.  Am I missing something here in the transition?
> 
> He talks about where I might run into a situation like a DOS attack and I
> could suddenly get a truly huge collection of log files that would fill up a
> partition and block other functions that need some disk room to operate.  It
> has been my practice, even in the DOS/Windows world, to create a separate
> partition for my data files.
> 
> If you are starting from scratch, with a dedicated Linux laptop, how many
> partitions would you build and what would you establish in each one?  Would
> I maybe want three partitions, one for data, one for the OS and
> applications, and one for swap and log files?
> 
> Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.
> 
> Jeff

Every time I've installed an OS, I wasted so much time thinking of how
to partition the disk.  Nothing is more frustrating than realizing
after the fact that you should have made one or more partitions
larger.  If this is your first linux install, I would suggest as
simple a partitioning scheme as possible as you'll probably want to
redo it later anyway.

If this is on a laptop then you probably won't be exposing services to
the internet so you shouldn't have to worry about logs and stuff
filling up.  You can even forgo individual partitions like /usr, /var,
/opt or /local.  If you have a way to back up any data in your /home
partition, you can probably skip that as well.  If you don't plan to
experiment with building your own kernel for a while, you can skip
/boot as well.  So the minimum would be one big root partition and
swap.    For swap, I'd go with either 2x your memory or at least 512
MB.

This lets you have tons of space to experiment with various packages
w/o worrying about a partition getting full.  Each time you try a new
distribution or reinstall, just take note of the space used in each
top level directory.  Once you get to the point where you want a
stable machine like for a home file server, then you can reference
your notes for your space usage.

I wouldn't bother with LVM at this point.  That's for future expansion
and can be a real hassle to set up. With hard disks so big now a days,
it's not worth it until you know what you are doing.

claude