Re: Partition Scheme for installing Debian Squeeze
On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 8:38 AM, lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> Wally Lepore <wallylepore@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Thank you for putting up your questions in such a well made way!
I appreciate that. Takes me forever to reply to all posts because I
need to make sure my questions are 'somewhat' clear. :-)
>> 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.
Ok thank you. Lisi kindly explained this in detail earlier in this thread.
>> 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.
Ok I'm reading this again and again. Awesome info here. Thank you. I
have no idea what /var and /opt actually stand for or what they are
used for but I continue to study?
> 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
Wow! Excuse my enthusiasm but you really explain this well! I
appreciate the amount of time you spent explaining this. Swap 10 gigs
?? I'm reading on.....
> 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 need to place /boot at the beginning of the disk because I am using
two hard drives in a dual-boot. For booting windows and Debian. /boot
will be at the beginning of the 2nd drive (sdb). This drive will be
100% devoted to debian. I will then change the boot order in BIOS to
have sdb drive boot. This will display a menu asking which OS to boot
(windows or debian). See the end of page 2 on this link please:
http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/07/23/dual-boot-ubuntu-12-04-and-windows-7-on-a-computer-with-2-hard-drives/
>> 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.
Ok Thank you. That is good to know, as I do not play games.
>
>> 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.
I have to re-read this again until it sinks in. Lot's of great
information here. I appreciate the effort Lee.
>
>> 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.
Ok but words like i3, rxvt, X11 are very foreign to me at this point.
I won't really get up to speed until I'm finished installing and can
start learning how to compile packages.
> 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.
Currently I have RAID turned off on my motherboard but I will consider
your suggestions. Definitely great advice!
> Do not install/use the console-kit-daemon. It creates and keeps about a
> hundred threads and slows things down noticeably.
Very interesting. I will consider that when I reach that point.
Thank you very much Lee.
Wally
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