Partitioning advice?

[mart_man00]

any one have any partitioning advice for a unix os for me? im not sure what a good partition table looks like. i think this will stay linux for awhile, but it maybe FreeBSD in a while.

on my 18GB hard drive with 256MB of ram(a laptop by the way) i was thinking of something like

/boot - 64
/ - ?
/usr - ?
/var - ?
/home - whats left over
/tmp - 250
SWAP - 256

i heard having /usr partition is good so i could mount it read only. and i know /var is mainly logs and since this is for my laptop, i really dont care about software security(in almost a year it went online only once for about 10mins). this is mainly for learning and programming, any advice for sizes or other useful partitions?

[Imperito]

Erm, I'd suggest that you make a /home partition of some GB size, for your documents, audio/video, and for compiling things (some people like to untar stuff into /usr, but that breaks when /usr is remote mounted or fundamentally unwritable.

Having /boot seperate is only needed if you are running more than one OS, and either need to synchronize your kernels or duck under BIOS limits.

A seperate /usr is a very good idea, thats where the action is!

A seperate /var helps you learn what caused cataclysmic failures if the / is fried, and also keeps runaway logs from choking /.

A seperate /tmp is sometimes useful, especially when your / is small and you want to keep it from being choked.

I tend to use bigger swaps, but that only because I tend to run servers.

Also, consider where you want your servers' data to be, if you intend to run servers. I like to keep all my servers' content files in subdirectories of /home, but thats somewhat nonstandard.

It's really your choice how you do it, of course, but I would probably do...

/      100MB
/var   50MB
/tmp   50MB
/home  5GB
/usr   13GB
swap   512MB

This comes out CLOSE to 18GB, I'm to tired for math.

[mart_man00]

just wondering here, why do most people give /usr its own partition but not /bin or /sbin? and what about /etc and /lib? why do they rarely(if ever) get there own partitions? maybe ive been playing around with my filesystems for to long here........................

[Imperito]

It has to do with what /usr and such can do without the / partition, and the other way around.

You can't have /lib, /sbin, /bin, or /etc seperate because what if the kernel needs a module to understand that fs type? The modulkes are in /lib, the loaders in /sbin, and the init configuration in /etc. Generally you want the / partition to contain that which is required for the most basic operations (especially diagnosing and repairing a shattered system) which is the rationale of putting some things (shell, basic CLI tools) in /bin and putting other things in /usr/bin. The system should be able to work, from a command line interface, having mounted only the / partition.

Some people would say you should have everything on one partition. This makes sense in a way, filling up /home with gigs left on /usr is annoying, but having seperate partitions gives you the ability to do things like axe the / partition and start fresh, but keep your data and programs, or even to mount /home and /usr over NFS from a remote machine.

But /bin /sbin /etc /lib need ot be on the / partition so it can function before /usr is mounted.

[mart_man00]

theres was more thing i need to know about my partitions, /tmp sizes. im thinking of just making a huge /tmp so i can have regular linux temp stuff ,windows temp along with misc stuff like web caches. i tried making /tmp a vfat partition(Red Hat 7.3) and its wanted it to be a linux partition, why? would it be safe for me a make one partition vfat and after linux is installed switch where /tmp is and filesystem to mount?

[mart_man00]

any one?

[kevinalm]

I would suggest not putting /temp on a vfat partition. Although what you have in mind could probably work, I suspect it would slow down your system. /temp is used a lot by many different programs and processes, and not having it in a linux native file system is not a very good idea.

Also, if your not locked into RH 7.3 I would suggest RH 8.0. I've been using it for a while now and my impression is that they have killed quite a few bugs since 7.3. Seems more stable to me anyway.

I only use two partitions myself, / and swap. I understand the rationale for multiple partitions, I just don't find them worth the trouble for a home system. Certainly, it does make sense on a server, for example.