What is the job for the root / , swap & home

[Ghost1989]

Hi all

I have big question in my mind

when I install ubuntu I prepare partitions as / , swap & home

but I did not know the job of each of them

I know that swap like ram but why he takes so much as I have a bigger ram

also I heard that home is not important

& what is the job of the root & highest space he has

& the last thing where is the programs installed if there is not a home partition

Ghost1989

[MikeTbob]

Swap is sorta like RAM, if you have 1GB of RAM, you may only need a very small Swap partition or none at all. /home is not important but if you plan on installing muliple distro's in search of one just for you, it's good to have a /home partition because you can save all your personal files here and not have to worry about losing this data when you format/re-install a distro.
Root, is the system administator and you should only use root when absolutely neccesary.
Programs are usually not installed to the /home partition, most times they will go into /bin or /usr/local but this is unimportant here.

[Bemk]

you can find the binary images of an application in the following directory's.

/bin
/sbin
/usr/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/sbin

/bin and /sbin are commonly used for administrative applications.

/usr/bin and /usr/sbin are commonly used for packages installed by a package manager.

/usr/local/bin is commonly used for packages compiled by the user. /usr/local/sbin is almost the same, but it's less frequently used.

Those are the configurations as I've found them most frequently.

[Cabhan]

I'd like to cover all of your questions in a bit more detail.

In UNIX, the filesystem appears as a big tree. Under Windows, you have a separate drive C:\, D:\, etc. Under Linux, you just have a big tree. The top of this tree is the / (called "root") directory. So for instance, the /etc directory is actually the "etc" directory inside of the root directory.

Because of this, the / partition is where everything lives unless it is on a separate partition.

swap is what is called "virtual memory". Every program on your computer thinks that it has 4 GB of memory available to it. Obviously, this is not possible, even if you have 4 GB of RAM physically. To accomplish this, swap space is used to store pages of memory, which are swapped into and out of actual memory as necessary.

The home directory is where user home directories live (for instance, /home/alex). A user's home directory is where all of his personal settings and documents are stored. A separate partition for /home is not strictly necessary, but you see it sometimes when a user has multiple distributions installed. This allows him to have the same /home no matter what partition he uses, which can make things more consistent.

root is the name of the system administrator. root is able to do anything on the system, no matter what permissions he actually has. As a result, it is very dangerous to run programs as root. You should never log in as root, and if you need to do something involving administrator access (installing a program, for instance), you should use either "sudo" or "su" to do so.

Finally, as for where packages are installed. Very few programs are installed to a user's home directory, as these would only be accessible to that user. Bemk has covered where system-wide binaries are stored.

[daark.child]

I recommend that you look at the File Heirarchy Standard. It should help answer some of your questions in great detail.

[Ghost1989]

thank you all for answering

daark.child the link is not working with me

also I have a small question

can I resize root for example from 5 to 6 GB taking 1GB form home & is it effect the system & how I could do it ..?

Ghost1989

[Bemk]

I think the problem is in the fact that there is a "/" missing at the end.

The right link would then be www.pathname.com/fhs/.

You can resize partitions when they are unmounted. You can do this with fdisk in the command line, gparted as a graphical instrument and I suppose there are (as usual in the world of FOSS) many others. If you want to resize your Root partition you should do it with a live CD or with another OS if installed to your system.

I guess there will also be enough documentation out there to help you.

The OS it self won't be affected, however, it does mean you can store one GB less on /home. In return you get one GB more for applications.

Maybe you can also repartition mounted partitions, but I recommend against that. It would probably lead to corruption of the partition.

[jayd512]

can I resize root for example from 5 to 6 GB taking 1GB form home & is it effect the system & how I could do it ..?

Bemk suggested using a LiveCD in his reply, I would like to agree, but also let you know that re-sizing is a breeze with something like Gparted.