Re: About to format the whole laptop, need some partitioning advice.

[Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com>]

Rather than answering all the naysayers individually, I'll explain
again, publicly, why I suggested the numbers I did.

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 12:41 AM, Anubhav Yadav <anubhav1691@gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay, I installed debian now, a perfect install with LVM.
> Here is the output of df -H
>
> Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> rootfs                   8.7G  330M  7.9G   5% /

For those who have complained that is too big:

Sometimes, /var fails to mount. And by the time you notice, the causes
and symptoms of the failed mount have dumped several gigabytes of log
messages in your root file system, because when /var the partition
(volume) doesn't mount, /var is in your root partition.

Sure, if you know what you are doing, it's not going to happen.
Probably. But it can happen, and an inexperienced user doesn't want to
be trying to figure out why /var/log is filling up his root partition
when he can't even run vi because the root partition is reporting over
100% full.

That's not the only reason, but it's a pretty good reason.

> udev                      11M     0   11M   0% /dev
> tmpfs                    830M  754k  830M   1% /run
> /dev/mapper/Debian-Root  8.7G  330M  7.9G   5% /
> tmpfs                    5.3M     0  5.3M   0% /run/lock
> tmpfs                    1.7G     0  1.7G   0% /run/shm
> /dev/mapper/Debian-Home  466G  427M  442G   1% /home

Yes, I would suggest shrinking that one now, before it gets to 5%
full. 40G would have been great, but shrinking it to 100G now is
pretty sure to be still safe.

If you want that space available to save video or sound files, make a
separate partition (er, logical volume) and mount it under
/home/share/, make a "share" user:group pair, set it so "share" can't
log in, just to be a little paranoid, and then make all your ordinary
login users members of the "share" group. (How you arrange the
subfolders in /home/share and how you set the group write permissions
is a bit a matter of taste and your patterns of use.)

And then you can have that space for storing lots of stuff, and if you
end up needing the space, you can move what you stored there out,
remove the logical volume, and add the space to other things.

> /dev/mapper/Debian-tmp    16G  174M   15G   2% /tmp

Roger's comments on /tmp are interesting. But, since /tmp, by
definition, should never have anything in it that must be there after
the next boot, you can test your system out now and try his suggestion
about tmpfs later, when you are more comfortable. Or try it now. I'm
pretty sure he's right that it wouldn't cause problems.

> /dev/mapper/Debian-Usr    32G  2.8G   28G  10% /usr

I am not going to argue here about the current movement to conflate
/usr/bin and /bin. I know the history, I know the current state, and
all I can say is that just about everybody seems to be blind about the
direction this should be going.

In Fedora, you don't currently want a separate /usr/bin because the
guys over there can't figure out how to boot without using stuff in
/usr/bin. The engineers here seem to be able to figure that one out.
And for reasons similar to the one I mentioned (and refrained from
mentioning) above, about /var, it's better to set a wall there. In
Debian, now, you can set the wall, so you should, even if there are
things this side of the wall that should be that side, and vice-versa.

> /dev/mapper/Debian-Var    32G  461M   30G   2% /var
>
> And this is what lvsan says
>   ACTIVE            '/dev/Debian/Root' [8.19 GiB] inherit
>   ACTIVE            '/dev/Debian/Usr' [29.80 GiB] inherit
>   ACTIVE            '/dev/Debian/Var' [29.80 GiB] inherit
>   ACTIVE            '/dev/Debian/tmp' [14.90 GiB] inherit
>   ACTIVE            '/dev/Debian/Swap' [3.72 GiB] inherit
>   ACTIVE            '/dev/Debian/Home' [440.52 GiB] inherit
>
> Is there anything wrong with this partitioning scheme.

Heh. There is never anything perfect when you talk about setting up
computer systems, so, yeah, there is likely to be something you'll
find you don't like about it. But if you'll shrink /home now, you'll
have lots of room to figure out what you prefer, and the hardest thing
I've faced with trying to keep my systems behaving like I want them is
not having room to move things around.

> As Joel advised (thanks) I made a big 565 GB primary LVM partition.
> and then created partitions as advised by Joel again.

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.