Disk partitioning strategy?

[Peter Halvorson <pjh@nfuel.com>]

Is there an accepted strategy for partitioning a disk for Linux?

I'm a bit nervous about making one huge partition; I don't want the
system to run into trouble because of one rogue process.  What I'm
used to is separate partitions for /, /usr, /tmp, and /home.  This
keeps the home directories and temp files from filling the OS partitions.
The basic OS in / is separated from the rest of the OS in /usr.  I've
also seen separate partitions for news, print, and mail spooling.
I've used a separate /usr/local partition in the past as well (this
was on Sun workstations).

In my particular case I will devote a 1.6G EIDE disk to Linux.

Is it easy to dynamically adjust the partition sizes? make them bigger?
smaller?  (AIX has its bad points, but it does do some neat tricks with
partitions, disks and filesystems.)

If I do break up the disk, what sizes work well?
(50 MB /, 350 MB /usr, 50 MB /tmp, and the rest in /home?)

I expect it might be very inconvenient to have to make a full tape
backup, repartition, and restore.


Just to raise the information content of this post I'll pass along 
a couple pieces of information I have found valuable.

There is an excellent web site at:

  http://www-ocean.tamu.edu/~baum/ocean_graphics.html

It specializes in scientific software with a bias towards software which
runs on Linux (information on hundreds of packages very well presented).  
I found the netCDF and udunits libraries for data storage and units 
conversion to be very well written (see links in web site or 
ftp.unidata.ucar.edu).




Peter Halvorson
Siemens Power Corp
pjh@nfuel.com