Partition sizes

[Minstrel]

Finally got my Debian install up and running (standard + KDE packages at the moment) thanks to help from some nice folks here.

I'm wondering about the partition sizes Debian chose for me when I installed, and if anyone can suggest I change these and reinstall before I get too much vested in the current installation.

Debian is residing on a 250 GB IDE drive, and I chose option 2, separate /, home, and swap partitions. By default, Debian allocated about 7.5 to root, 2.5 to swap, and the remaining 240 to home.

I'm planning to run a few different image manipulation applications, some larger games, maybe a small MUD server if I get ambitious. Should I put some more space in root? I don't plan to fill up the disk with music/movies any time soon, so I'm not bothered by cutting into that big chunk of free home space.

[jens]

7.5 gig should be enough if you don't go crazy with "apt-get install ...".
If you happen to run out of space, you can alway change that later.
Consider making a new /opt partition if you plan to install many really huge games (or just install them in your home map)
PS: Use LVM if you plan to change your partition sizes a lot.

[bigtomrodney]

Personally if you have it to spare I would create a seperate partition. I went bananas and made it about 9GB so I could rip DVDs or deal with some big archives but usually you wouldn't need that. I just generally recommend that it is seperate so that old temp files don't end up filling your root partition. I would say that 2.5GB is probably a bit large for swap. I wouldn't make it any bigger than 1GB unless you need to deal with huge files.

[lilcuda]

I agree that your swap is way to big , just a waste of valuable disk space even with a massive drive. The swap you choose will depend on the amount of ram you have but personally I would not use more than 512mb .

Suse has a recommended partition scheme for over 4gb drives and it is laid out as / 1gb ,/user 4gb+ ,/opt 4gb+ ,/var 1gb ,/home rest of drive .You could have a space for /tmp in the mix as well.

That could be used with any distro I would say but the final options are up to you and depends on how many programs you install as stated previously .

If you like to keep it simple than go for a 512mb swap ,something like 10gb or more in root and the rest home .

[Minstrel]

Thanks for all the advice all. I went the LVM route and toned down the swap space also as everyone suggested. I'll probably chop it up more as I learn linux more, for now /, swap and /home seem to be working pretty well for me.