about manual partition size

[paulga]

Given a 44G drive, how do you set the layout for the basic partitions, say
/, /home, /boot, and swap? how large should / and /home be?
I searched for it and found this link: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archiv...php/t-323.html
just not sure whether the rules discussed in this article still apply now.
and someone suggest to separate out /usr, /usr/share, /var, /tmp, how large should these partitions be?

[stoat]

While you wait for the opinions to flood in on that, I would like to very briefly try to make the case for a single root partition for an ordinary home computer. One, it's good enough for Windows. Two, separate system partitions waste disk space. Three, separate system partitions waste partitions as you already know. And four, separate system partitions can fill up, bust the the system, require constant maintenance or adjustment.

I only wanted to make sure that you didn't think separate partitions for system directories is required. Now, get ready for the rebuttal.

[Seve]

Hello:

Fun stuff

I won't present any rebuttal to stoat's comments

Given what you have to work with, this is just a suggestion ....

/boot < --- basic MBR - 400 MiB
/ < ---- where the OS goes - 12 Gig
/swap < ---- at least the size of your ram if a laptop, else <= (2 x Ram)
/home < ---- the remainder of available space

No need to make other separate partitions, IMO

Or you can just accept the Installation default and have the system create a LVM for you.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
Will walk you through the options etc.

Seve

[jpollard]

rebuttal:-)

One, it's good enough for Windows.

Not relevant. Who cares. Windows has so many problems partitioning it doesn't help.
Windows USED to partition - and still does for those systems that have a
"recovery" partition and not a recovery CD. Talk about wasted space...

The minimum partitioning is a /boot, and /.
/boot should be at least 400MB, and possibly as much as 1G for future expansion
requirements of kernels. The larger space also allows you have multiple layers of
backup kernels (more than the default of 3).

Swap space, if needed, can be added interactively as long as there is space available.
You just create a file of the size you want for swap space, then run
"mkswap" on the file. Once run the file can be mounted as swap using the "swapon"
utility.

The main key to the swap file is that it must be created without "holes" - something
like using "dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1000" will create a 1Gbyte
file full of zeros.

For laptops, having a partition for /home depends entirely on the owner. It is usefull
for preventing accidents that wipeout a filesystem (accidentally creating a new
filesystem on one) from wiping out the entire system. But that type of error doesn't
happen very often, and can cause installation problems if the root partition isn't
large enough.

[paulga]

Thanks men.
What I was curious was the ratio of / and /home. Now I'm clear.