Subject: Re: Partitions? Preparing for Linux...
From: Josh Smith (irilyth@infersys.com)
Date: Wed May 24 2000 - 00:05:50 MDT
Partitioning is one of those topics where the maxim "there's more than one
way to do it" [1] certainly applies. Getting it exactly perfectly right
requires you to know how exactly you're going to use the system. You can
generally make some decisions that won't get you into too much trouble,
though.
One of the most fundamental decisions is whether to have fewer big
partitions, or more small ones.
The main advantage of having more small ones is that if one fills up, the
others aren't affected -- if you have one big partition, and it fills, you
have no space anywhere else. This makes the most sense if you're going to be
doing things that might fill your disk, like downloading lots files, or
generating huge datasets, or having multiple users on your system who may
not be careful about keeping an eye on their disk usage.
The main advantage of having fewer big partitions is that you don't have to
predict in advance how much space you'll need. If you put /home and
/usr/local each onto its own 1 GB partition, and then find that you have 1.3
GB of stuff that belongs in /home and 0.5 GB of stuff that belongs in
/usr/local, you're just out of luck... Whereas if you have one 2 GB
partition that holds both /home and /usr/local, it doesn't matter exactly
how much is in each, as long as the total is under 2 GB.
My personal favorite partitioning scheme is to have /usr on its own
partition, and everything else in one big / filesystem. On Linux systems, I
also have a small /boot partition, because I heard once that it's a good
idea, but I'm a bit embarassed to admit that I don't know exactly why (or
even whether it's really true). I store everything other than the OS in
/local, so I can find it easily, and /home is thus a symlink to /home. I use
/software instead of /usr/local for third-party software, so /software is a
link to /local/software, but you could make /usr/local a link to
/local/usr-local if you wanted to.
If you're worried about log files or temp directories filling up, splitting
off /var is a fine idea; the only disadvantage is that if you give yourself
500 MB, and then discover that you really want 600 MB, you'll be bummed.
12 GB sounds like a lot to me, but I don't do too many disk-space-intensive
things. I'm getting by just fine with a 1 GB MacOS partition right now, but
I don't use the MacOS side of my iBook for much, so if you use MacOS a lot,
I'd give yourself 3 - 6 GB. Setting aside 1 GB for /usr and the rest for /
will give you plenty of space, and with that much, I wouldn't worry too much
about partitioning it up -- you're unlikely to ever do anything that fills
your entire disk.
Just my two cents; do what works for you. (grin) Good luck!
-Josh (irilyth@infersys.com)
[1] I first heard this used to describe the Perl progamming language.
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