Re: Partition size
Matěj Hausenblas <matejh@pandora.be> writes:
> I have woody on my PC and since it's working perfectly I'm thinking about
> removing my other Linuxes (SuSE and Mandrake, there's no more windows;)
> This action will give me two 2GB partitions, so I would like to ask if it's
> better to make larger /home (which is actually 28GB) or if I should make
> these partitions useful for other purpose: /tmp /usr /usr/local /var (and
> something else?)
Having a separate /home is definitely useful. In my experience,
splitting out other partitions is far less so; you wind up discovering
that all of /, /var, and /usr are too small, but you'd have enough
room if they were all one partition. (In particular, you want a
largish /var on Debian, but only because APT downloads packages to
there, so if space is tight you briefly need large chunks of space.)
Since it doesn't sound like you're constrained for space, I'd probably
try partitioning like this:
/ 4 GB
/home 8 GB (or more)
/scratch 8 GB (or more; space for CD images, or can be tossed for
other OS)
??? 10 GB (certain non-free OS's you need for games)
> If so, what should be the sizes for it; my system is quite workstation with
> multimedia and some server applications.
If you have lots of music (mmm, Ogg Vorbis) you might create a
separate partition for that. "Some server applications" don't
actually take up much space these days. Really, you should figure out
what you're using your space for, and allocate your hard drive
correctly.
At any rate, conventional wisdom seems to be that you should have /,
/usr, /usr/local, /var, and /home partitions. My home machine has a
smallish / (okay), a 2 GB /usr (almost too small), I think a 300 MB
/var (definitely too small) and big /usr/local and /home directories.
The partition that's now /scratch used to be an OpenAFS server
partition. If I were reinstalling the machine, I'd definitely go with
a big / and a big /home over the separate partitions; the flexibility
is nice, and the big thing you lose is constraining the extent to
which bad blocks on disk can hurt you.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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