Re: partition magic-ally
On 8 Jun 2005 12:05:38 -0700
"prash" <iprash@gmail.com> wrote:
> hello,
> i have a spanking new machine with a 40 gb hard disk - all for my
> favorite distro! of course too much space is a bad thing too
> (especially when you don't know how to allocate it).
> i have decided on this scheme to begin with:
> / : 7.0 gb
> swap : 1.5 gb (i have 512mb ram)
> /usr : 4.0 gb
> /usr/local : 18.0 gb (i WILL install anything/everything out
> there)
Most stuff (unless you're planning on compiling up a lot of stuff
that's not in repositories) will install in /usr, thus I suggest you
may be wasting space here.
> /home : 4.0 gb
> /home/prash : 4.0 gb (i am ego(t)istic that way)
Why the split? If 'prash' needs more space he will be crying and
running back /home ;). Better to just have one partition here, you can
still have a separate dir for 'prash', of course.
> /boot : 0.5 gb (is this enough?)
> /var : 1.0 gb (is this enough? this is NOT a mail/news
> server)
Personally I don't see the need for a separate boot partition. But it
seems adequate. /var is probably safe, although a huge upgrade could
eat up 300-400 megabytes for apt cache files - and they go into /var.
> 1. why should i (and how can i) define a /tmp partition when i don't
> know what temporary space each app might take? a dvd burner might
Most people either overcommit or undercommit quite a bit, especially if
they don't have a good idea of what space it can take up. It may be
preferable to keep /tmp as part of /. Maybe if you give / 10 gb, and
release some of the space taken up by /usr/local.
I'm currently running on a 30 gig drive, and some of my initial
partition settings seem to be not enough -- for instance, I gave 5 gb
each to /, /home, /usr/local, and then much of the rest is (currently)
unused -- it used to be my / for Mandrake, but I now have it mounted
at /mnt and use /mnt/tmp as my 'big' repository for such things as huge
dvd rips and such -- that stuff won't fit anyway in /home. Today, if I
were going to do a wipe & reinstall, I'd give more space to / and to /
home, and likely get rid of /usr/local. In the beginning I also had
'opt' but quickly found that there was little software I was really
going to install.
> 2. suppose i reduce the partition sizes of some of the folders above
> and keep aside, let's say, 5gb of "unpartitioned/empty/unused" space.
I think you can (qparted) but I haven't tried it, and I'm not even sure
if you can add to (for instance) /home if the unused space is at the
end of the drive, and oher partitions are physically between the
partition you want to expand, and the free space 'pool'. And I'm a
little skittish about trying that without having a verifiable backup
done first.
I have moved things around with tar | tar type 'backups' before, as my
needs changed, then reusing the partitions as something else. And
that's a doable method, as long as you have enough space somewhere to
hold a tar (or tar.gz) of the partition.
> -prash.
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David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
dfox@tsoft.com change magnetic patterns
dfox@m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com on your hard disk.
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