Re: Partition Scheme for installing Debian Squeeze
Wally Lepore <wallylepore@gmail.com> writes:
Thank you for putting up your questions in such a well made way!
> An interesting side note: Both identical drives are 'Enhanced IDE'
> drives (EIDE). However for some reason during the debian set-up, the
> installer identified them as SCSI drives and labeled them as follows
>
> SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) -80.0 GB ATA WDC [serial number]
> SCSI1 (0,1,0) (sdb) -80.0 GB ATA WDC [serial number]
>
> Question #1 please:
> Is this SCSI labeling something I can ignore? I continued on and moved
> forward to the partition section (where I'm at now) with no issues.
That should be ok. However, it's been a long time that I used IDE
disks, so I don't know for sure.
> My partition scheme (that I have not set-up yet and based somewhat on
> the above link) will be as follows:
>
> 1st Partition -- Boot Partition
> /boot -- Type: Primary -- 500MB -- Ext4 journaling file system --
> Location: Beginning
>
> Second Partition -- Root Partition
> / -- Type: Logical -- 15000MB -- Ext4 journaling file system
> -- Location: Beginning
>
> 3rd Partition -- Home Partition
> /home -- Type: Logical -- 60000MB -- Ext4 journaling file system --
> Location: Beginning
>
> SWAP Area
> Swap -- Type: Logical -- 2000MB -- Ext4 journaling file system --
> Location: Beginning
>
> Question #2 please:
> Is this an acceptable partition set-up? Based on a disk capacity of 80
> gigs, are the allotted partition sizes acceptable? Any suggestions
> please ?
It depends on what you want to use the computer for. If you (mainly)
use it to learn programming in C/C++/Object C, you're not like to need a
lot of space on /var and probably no /opt partition, for example.
To give you some numbers:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg0-root 4.7G 1.2G 3.3G 27% /
/dev/mapper/vg0-tmp 93G 1.5G 87G 2% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg0-usr 47G 9.5G 35G 22% /usr
/dev/mapper/vg0-usrlocal 19G 545M 18G 4% /usr/local
/dev/mapper/vg0-var 93G 19G 70G 22% /var
/dev/mapper/vg0-rest 104G 16G 83G 16% /var/spool/squid-00
This kind of partitioning is the result of my experience and having
plenty disk space for the system. I do not have /boot on a separate
partiton, and "du -hs /boot" says that 69MB are used. The /var
partition is large because I'm running a web server, and I'm using
squid. Squid puts its files into /var/spool/squid and
/var/spool/squid-00, and 14GB of the 19GB in /var are used by squid.
On /usr/local/, I have emacs24, fvwm, i3 (these are too old in Debian
testing) and a few libraries. That's why 545MB are used there.
Since you have a smaller disk, the actual partition sizes aren't
relevant. What these numbers tell you is how much space you may want to
plan on for each of the different partitions. You might want something
like this:
swap 10GB [1]
/ 2GB including /boot
/usr 12GB
/var 2GB
/tmp 2GB
/home the rest of it
It adds up to 28GB, so that leaves you 52GB for /home. Since this is
either plenty or totally insufficient, I'd make the partitions a little
larger because in any case, it doesn't really matter if your /home is
10GB more or less. You'll get something like this:
swap 10GB [1]
/ 3GB including /boot
/usr 15GB
/var 4GB
/tmp 4GB
/home the rest of it
[1]: There's a recommendation to have swap partitions at the very
beginning of the disk because it's supposed to be faster. I'd make
it that large because you might want to do something that needs a
lot of memory and because with only 2GB, you may run out too soon.
Besides, swap space is a way to slow things down before the system
starts killing off processes when it runs out of memory which can
bring it down. It improves your chances to kill processes
yourself, making better decisions about which ones to kill. If
you're getting tight, make swap at leas 5GB.
> I am also 'meticulously' reading the debian install instructions as
> well and Debian mentions other available directories such as:
> dev, lib, opt, var, usr, sys --- etc. Please see the list of
> additional directories:
> http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apcs02.html.en
>
> Question #3 please:
> I am not sure if I need to include 'any' of these additional
> directories (listed above) in my partition scheme.
The only actually additional one is /opt. Applixware (which AFAIK
doesn't exist anymore) suggested installing under /opt. Other than
that, I've never found any other use for /opt than putting games on it.
For games, your disk is too small to have a reasonably sized /opt
partition, and nothing forces you to put anything there, so you don't
really need it.
You will have the other directories.
> I am also studying the following programming languages: 'C' then C++
> and Object 'C' and would like to know if I need to include any
> additional directories/partitions (from the list above) for my
> 'programming' needs.
You may want to put your own programs into /usr/local, that's why I
listed it above. If you have 36GB in partitions as above, you can spare
like 2GB and still have 42GB for /home (instead of 44GB). I have a
directory ~/inst where I put all stuff I might install, for example the
sources of emacs, fvwm and i3. That has grown over years (like
everything else) and holds currently 23GB, so you're still fine for
programming with a 42GB home. I also have a directory ~/src with stuff I
wrote myself, and it's only 108MB.
> System specs:
>
> iWill DVD266R motherboard
> 'Dual' Pentium III cpu's (1 GHz each) Total: 2 GHz
> 1 gig DDR memory
> CD-R/RW
> DVD - R/RW
That may be somewhat slow for programming when you compile stuff.
You're really tight on RAM, so you'll probably want a slim X11 session.
In any case, install a minimal system and add what you need later. As
for your X11 session for programming, you might be happy with emacs (and
gnus for your email, so the first thing is to compile emacs because the
one in Debian is too old) as an editor, i3 as a window manager and rxvt
as a terminal, and maybe tmux.
Having that said, you might get away with about 5GB for /usr. I won't
do that, though, because it just sucks when you later find you made it
too small --- and it doesn't really matter if /home is 10GB more or
less. If you need more space, better get another disk and use that for
/home --- preferably at least two so you can use RAID.
Do not install/use the console-kit-daemon. It creates and keeps about a
hundred threads and slows things down noticeably.
--
Debian testing iad96 brokenarch
Reply to: