on Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 02:43:10AM -0500, Walter Dnes (waltdnes@waltdnes.org) wrote:
> I've been lurking for a couple of weeks here. I started switching
> over to Debian in September because Redhat was dropping RH7.3 (their
> best distro ever, and it was damn good) and replacing it with
> bloatware and coming up with "version-du-jour" on a pace to beat
> Microsoft. I want to *USE* my computer, not be constantly upgrading
> upgrading upgrading. (Yes, I *LIKE* "rusty" and "stale" <g> ).
> Anyhow, on to my question.
>
> When I install the latest Debian on my "B" machine (450mhz, 128 megs
> RAM), I want to be able to use a small /var partition. With Redhat, I
> used...
The one thing you *don't* say is how much space you've got on the disk.
> 1 => / (3 gigs)
I'd split that as:
/: 150 MiB
/tmp: 150-250 MiB.
/usr: 3 GiB
> 2 => extended partition (the rest of the harddrive)
> 5 => swap (256 megs)
> 6 => /var (256 megs)
> 7 => /misc (the rest of the harddrive)
I'd dump /misc and make it /home. For a workstation.
> After a virgin install, I log on as root and...
>
> mv /home /misc/home
> ln -s /misc/home /home
>
> What's nice is that when I go to a newer version, I can reformat the
> 1st partition and install the new version. Then I log on as root and...
>
> rm -r /home
> ln -s /misc/home /home
>
> And I'm back in business. And since I'm running my machine only for
> me, mutt and slrnpull spool directly to my user dir.
>
> My understanding is that Debian loads a whole slew of packages in /var
> during the main install and I need to have at least a gig of space. Is
> that correct ? Which directory ? Is it possible to symlink that
> directory elsewhere ?
Mostly: your apt cache archive, in /var/cache/apt/archives.
# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 99M 80M 15M 85% /
/dev/hda1 38M 11M 26M 30% /boot
/dev/hda9 259M 49M 211M 19% /tmp
/dev/hda10 1004M 450M 555M 45% /var
/dev/hda11 3.0G 2.4G 624M 80% /usr
/dev/hda12 1004M 220M 785M 22% /usr/local
/dev/hda13 12G 3.9G 7.4G 35% /home
# cd /var
# du -s * | sort -nr
201435 cache
141533 lib
51029 tmp
29073 log
17465 account
5641 www
4757 backups
1732 spool
282 run
26 games
17 mail
5 lock
1 opt
1 local
1 autofs
...that's with a recently cleaned out package cache. More often I'm
running ~75-85% utilized in /var, and a major update can suck up more.
You *can* get by with a smaller cache, most of the time, if you use the
"--no-download" option after you run out of space in /var, then flush
cache with "apt-get clean". You can also use a remote archive mounted
via NFS, or an apt-proxy cache, in some cases.
Alternatively, symlink this directory to a larger partition. If you've
got relatively little space, I'd allocate 3-4 GiB to /usr and symlink
/var to /usr/var (which doesn't exist otherwise).
Or you could just give yourself One Big Partition and deal with the
attendant problems.
There's a short FAQ on GNU/Linux system partitioning you may find
useful, at:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/partition.html
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Data corrupts. Absolute data corrupts absolutely.
-- Ed Self's corollary of Atkinson's Law.
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