Re: Trying to get started in the Linux world
On Sat, 29 Aug 1998, EGRET Lures wrote:
> I am going to do a clean install of both before installing Linux.
> The present disk is partitioned as follows:
> C: 200mb FAT16 DOS
> D: 3GB NTFS NT4WS
> E: 4GB FAT16 Empty(Linux)
> F: 500MB FAT16 Misc. files
>
> I would appreciate any help on repartitoning for the Linux installation
> on E:
How people partition their disks vary considerably. At the very least you
will want separate /, /usr, and /var partitions. THe reason for this is to
prevent a partition from filling and crashing your system. Also exactly
how you partiton it will change depending on how you use your system.
What you want to avoid is a situation where you decide to play with news,
download a ton of it, fill up the disk, and now /tmp is not writeable
because the disk is full and applications begin to crash. To start you can
probably put everything on one partition. 4GB is a lot for Linux. I would
probably partition it as follows:
/ = 300MB
/usr = 2G
/var = 1G
/home = 1G <-- This depends on how many users you have
There is a lot of documentation in /usr and that is also where source code
goes. My home machine looks like this:
$ df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda1 627311 221124 373782 37% /
/dev/hdb2 414725 359405 33900 91% /usr
/dev/hdc1 1987758 740274 1144746 39% /var
$
As you can see, I have too much space allocated to /var and not enough to
/usr.
My remote server looks like this:
$ df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda1 461529 42445 395247 10% /
/dev/hdb5 743120 417593 310173 57% /usr
/dev/hdb8 495777 329544 155990 68% /var
/dev/hdb6 247902 36208 206573 15% /usr/local
/dev/hdb9 495777 7995 477539 2% /var/spool
/dev/hdb10 1917032 1046941 849614 55% /var/spool/news
/dev/hdd1 2422533 1150721 1246764 48% /home/ftp
$
It might look like I have a lot of wasted space in /var/spool but I serve
UUCP sites and if someone does not pick up their mail/news for a couple of
weeks, it can get pretty full.
I would suggest simply creating a swap partition of about 128MB and put
the rest as one partition to start with. Play with Linux for about 6
months, then look to see how much space you are using in /var and /usr
then back the system up, repartition according to the ratios noted above
and then restore.
George Bonser
The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!
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