Partitioning for a new PC

[dan@george]

I'm building a new PC on which I want to put Gentoo, and I've done some research about partitioning. But I want to be sure I've got the right idea, so here is my setup:
> AMD Athlon 64 2.0 GHz
> 2 160 GB hard drive
> 1 GB DDRAM

And here's what I'm thinking for my partitioning on my primary drive:

/boot     512MB
/         3GB
/usr      4GB
/opt      3.5GB
/home     146GB
/tmp      2GB
swap      1GB

And that's the order in which I would put them, from the low cylinders to the high ones, so the most frequently written-to partitions are near the outside. That would put /boot, /, and /usr partitions on primary partitions, and the rest on logical ones. Is this alright?

I just want to make sure I'm thinking the right direction, and that this partitioning scheme will work. Let me know if I'm doing anything stupid.

[U-Turn]

You're almost there. I'd make / about 1GB and make a /var partition at about 2GB. /opt doesn't need to be that large. Mine is 1GB and with KDE 3.2.3 and various sundry additional bits for KDE installed there it's only about 1/3 full.
I'd also reduce the size of swap. Given that you have 1GB phisical ram, the likelyhood that you'll ever use swap is almost nil. I'd reduce it to 512MB max if I even installed a swap partition at all.

[dan@george]

Fair enough, so

/boot     512MB
/         1GB
/usr      4GB
/opt      2GB
/home     149GB
/var      1GB
/tmp      2GB
swap      512MB

would be better? I want to keep some room in /opt in case I want to install any large games.

[U-Turn]

Yes. Considerably. I wasn't even thinking of /opt for games.
The reason I encourage the use of a seperate /var partition is because, when you use distro tools such as apt, urpmi and, in your case, portage, /var is where the software downloads to. It's the place where the package gets opened and it's the place, allong with /tmp, where the work occurs to build and install the package. So, if you get a dirty package, say a package designed speciffically to cause a buffer overrun gets past security(unlikely I know but better to be on the safe side), if /var resides on the / partition, / gets destroyed and there goes all your hard work. With /var and /tmp reside on their own partitions, damage can be minimized to those partitions.

[imand]

good . but you don'd need 1GB for /swap , your ram is enough (1GB) .I think 500MB is good enough ,even if you are playing games

[sarumont]

And you definately don't need 512 for /boot. 32M will suffice.

[dan@george]

Thanks everyone. Combining your advice, here's what I think I'm going to do:

/boot     32MB
/         1GB
/usr      4GB
/opt      2GB
/home     (the rest)
/var      1GB
/tmp      2GB
swap      512MB

[kkubasik]

this might be a handing thread to have in our toturial section.

[dan@george]

It would be good if there were a partitioning guide in the Tutorials section, but the problem is that the process is different for everyone. You really have to research and make your own decisions (with an occasional nudge from U-Turn, imand, and sarumont; thanks again, guys). It's hard to write a well-laid-out tutorial on partitioning when some people want dual-boot systems, some people want workstations, some want gaming boxes, and they all have different systems. Maybe the best way to write this kind of tutorial would be to include links to a wide variety of online partitioning explanations and introduce the reader to a lot of different viewpoints, but I don't know how one could make that into a manageable project.

[kkubasik]

exactly, but this is a nice example of what is required and what isnt, its not well suited for a newbie, but someone like you or I, who can do partitioning, it offers good pointers (like the /tmp and /var) not a comprehensive guide in the least, but handy. ill probably bookmark it and read over it again before i partion my next drive.