Partition Question

[murph1083]

Im currently installing SuSE 10.1 and I am about to partition the drive. I was going to have Linux deside how big to make the partitions but it wants to make:

swap = 2GB
root = 20GB
home = 52.5GB

Does the root seem too big or is that ok? I am going to be the only user on the computer.

[compugen]

I suppose you are using 80GB disk.

Swap should, generally, be double of your physical ram. But i prefer it keeping it average. So for me if my RAM is 1GIG i ll prefer having at max 750MG of swap partition. Depends what kind of use you are having. I am definitely not a gamer so I dont require that thing much. However, I'll leave this thing for experts of the forum to help you out with.

Root will store all the default things that OS will be having. That is anything that SUSE downloads, packs and updates goes in here. (Experts, please correct me if I am wrong. And I have a question in here on root which I ll ask in seperate thread.) Infact some say you can do away with everything if you except root. So that makes it most critical. On a percentage I always give OS at max 25% of the total drive. This keeps the system intact and it leaves me more focussed on what to get and what not to. ( My theory -- If you have space, you stuff it with crap. If you dont have it, you dont dare mess it..).

Home is always a good choice. Its like having your personal data in here. You format anything or reinstall or upgrade or shift to any distro you carry your home to new distro. You can mount this home to any distro. I have read over net ppl generally keep it like this::

I part of drive have one OS
II part is home ....formatted with ext3 or reiserfs
III part is swap.

You can use various utilities to read such /home partitions from windows itself. Helps you port your data easily on dual booting system. So i ll keep it not more than 60% of the remaining.

So on my calc it would be:
75% of 1gig -- 750MEGS of Swap (considering avg user/gamer..no idea abt realtime/3d gaming)
25% of 80GB --20GB (Considering the fact that SUSE is a bit bulky. Basic offering is 800MB , read on this same forum, and we being novice will try to have all the things we can that we generally know)
60% of (80GB-(20GB+1GB) -- 35GB approx. (Its tempting to use rest of the drive as home bt i dont prefer it. You can create, resize partition as and when require. Linux is flexible with your things...DONT THINK THIS ABOUT ROOT PARTITION PLS.)

Sometime later if you plan to install one more distro to this system you can simply allocate remaining space to its root. You can share the swap partition since at a single time you can access one distro. Secondly you have the home partition in the middle of the drive. That is first block with one root and last block with one root. Read it over one forum which dealt with h/w that this kind of scenario is good since the drive head doesn't have to work to and fro and it becomes the average while accessing the home partition. That means if /home is at start of 40Gig then /root (1-20Gig block) will scan half the drive viz. till the end of your /home partition. SImilarly any new distro that is on the last block will have to span till half and will not go beyond /home.

Hope that helps...

Cheers

[antidrugue]

I don't know about those % calculation and all that, but 20G is way too much in my opinion for "/" (root) partition. On a standard desktop system at least.

For example, here is the output of

df -h

on my system (well, the one I'm using at this moment).

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 7.0G 3.8G 2.9G 57% /
tmpfs 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 89M 16M 69M 19% /boot
/dev/sda7 49G 24G 23G 52% /home
tmpfs 506M 132K 506M 1% /dev

Forget about those "tmpfs" things.

So my desktop (1024M RAM & 80G hard drive) is partitioned like that:

100M /boot EXT3
1.3G SWAP
7.6G / (root) EXT3
52G /home EXT3

By the way, my SWAP size is probably too big for normal desktop use. And I have 15G for XP.

[murph1083]

I only have 256MB of memory now but I will be getting another 256 very soon. Would you say make my swap like 1GB? Also, should I dring my root down to 10GB? When I install programs on my login (thats not root) but requires me to give a root password. Do these files go to root when installed for do they get installed on home?

Sorry for so many question but you guys are really helping me out.

[LinuxBox420]

Is this going to be a desktop? Do you have a lot of media files? If you have 1G+ RAM then you don't even need a /swap partition. Your /home partition is really big. If you're going to download/rip video/mp3 files then make an /mp3 partition to go with your /, /home partitions. My scheme looks like...


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 14G 1.8G 13G 13% /
/dev/hda1 25G 13G 13G 50% /windows
/dev/hda5 28G 2.7G 26G 10% /home
/dev/hda6 47G 21G 26G 45% /mp3
/dev/hda8 36G 5.8G 30G 17% /video

[Roxoff]

Is this going to be a desktop? Do you have a lot of media files? If you have 1G+ RAM then you don't even need a /swap partition. Your /home partition is really big. If you're going to download/rip video/mp3 files then make an /mp3 partition to go with your /, /home partitions. My scheme looks like...


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 14G 1.8G 13G 13% /
/dev/hda1 25G 13G 13G 50% /windows
/dev/hda5 28G 2.7G 26G 10% /home
/dev/hda6 47G 21G 26G 45% /mp3
/dev/hda8 36G 5.8G 30G 17% /video

Noooooo... dont use mp3, it's proprietary. Use open standards such as ogg and FLAC.

[LinuxBox420]

MP3 as a format is completely legal. MP3 files become illegal when someone has taken copyrighted music, made copies of it, and distributed it to others without the rightful consent of the owners.

[murph1083]

If i install a program and I install in in either root or another login. Does it get installed in the root sector or the home sector. Even if I have to submit a root password.

[antidrugue]

MP3 as a format is completely legal.

MP3 is proprietary as Roxoff said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3#Lic..._patent_issues

You have to pay royalties to a compagny called Thompson in order to use it in a software:
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/

[antidrugue]

If i install a program and I install in in either root or another login. Does it get installed in the root sector or the home sector. Even if I have to submit a root password.

/ (root) is pretty much the equivalent of c:/windows + c:/Program Files in MS Windows. By default it olds everything, unless you specify otherwise (ex: a separate /home directory, a separate /boot directory, etc.).

The "standard" for desktop use is to have / et /home separated.

/home only contains your personnal files (equivalent of My Documents) and programs don't install there by default.