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Re: Sarge install thoughts...



On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 02:15:14PM -0500, Brendan wrote:
> On Friday 11 February 2005 06:14, Jon Dowland wrote:
> > Bob wrote:
> > > For a desktop machine is the
> > > three partitions recommended by the guided option of /, /swap and /home
> > > enough...?
> >
> > Personally I'd say that was one too many. There's not much to suggest a
> > seperate /home partition is necessary for a desktop machine.
> 
> Bunk.
> 
> /home is the only important separation for a desktop machine (obviously beyond 
> swap, duh). Try to explain to a former Windows person the advantages of 
> having to backup ALL of your "My Documents" stuff before you reinstall Linux 
> (if there was a problem). Yeah, no. Experts can obviously choose their own 
> partitioning scheme.

I'd even go so far as to place /home as more important than swap, as I
go for a swap file nowadays rather than a swap partition. The only
exception is when I was playing around with the kernel suspend - for
that you need a swap partition. I don't know of any drawbacks for
swap files (except for a slight speed penalty perhaps?) and they are more 
flexible: swapoff, change swap file size, swapon - no partitions to
change. Apart from that I fully agree with you about the separate /home,
full stop.

Andreas
> 
> /home is vital to beginners and makes fixing problems much, much easier. I 
> guess you have never had to walk someone 1200 miles away through a 
> reinstall...imagine having to explain how to backup files first to removable 
> media, etc.
> Much easier to just NOT format /home in the install...and with hard drives 
> coming in hundreds of gb, I just don't see an issue with "space"...
> 



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