partition sizes ?

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I am going to stick a new HD in and am looking to move to Linux full time( currently undecided on either ubuntu or CentOS) and am looking to partition my new drive to have a seperate /home partition

so whats the best way to partition a 500Gb drive ?
 
I dunno... I'd have thought 10 GB for /root, swap which is at most twice your RAM and the rest as /home.

Not sure if that's necessarily the best setup but it's what first sprang to mind reading the post.
 
so i have [email protected] 4gb ram ---500gb

swap = 8GB
/ = 40gb
home = 100gb

how / where do you allocate the rest ? or do you just use the rest for home or can i have a partition for music, one for video extc
 
so i have [email protected] 4gb ram ---500gb

swap = 8GB
/ = 40gb
home = 100gb

how / where do you allocate the rest ? or do you just use the rest for home or can i have a partition for music, one for video extc
Might as well just use /home for that. I'm struggling to think of a reason why you'd not do that..... unless you maybe needed it to be some obscure file system for compatibility with some other OS.
 
/boot - about 32mb
swap - dunno, about 320mb, my compy rarely used this once I upgraded the ram from 512mb to 1gig - depends what you're running I guess :)
/root - about 20gig - depends a lot on what you want to install (I used to have ut2004 on there and it took about 6gig if I remember correctly)
/home - the rest :)

so i have [email protected] 4gb ram ---500gb

swap = 8GB

8GB for swap? Surely that is overkill? (further edit: unless you are running something that really needs it of course :))
 
Last edited:
The / filesystem has to be fairly large unless you choose to partition /usr and /usr/local and wherever the kernel source files go.

The rest can maybe be /tmp and /home
 
If it's your first install I wouldn't bother splitting it up. Do it next time after you've observed your own usage pattern.

This is sound advice. If it's your first install, give it all to /. The possible exception being to give 100GB to /home. Then when you reinstall you'll have your home dirs - and will be able to partition the rest as appropriate.

Personally I give: 16GB to /; 100GB to /home; 30GB to /root; and the rest to /opt. But that's because /opt is where I dump near enough everything, including VMs and downloads.

Or, you could do as suggested and dive in at the deepend, and use LVM. :)
 
100MB for /boot
8192MB for SWAP
LVM partition for rest of disk

Then add the following logical volumes:

/ - 10GB or so to start with ?
/home - however big you think you'll need it.
 
Oooh, didn't know that. Neat

Indeed (as long as you have e2fsprogs => version 1.39-1 and a recent kernel afaik), pretty much a simple case of:

lvextend -L+10G /path/to/my/logicalvolume
resize2fs /path/to/my/logicalvolume
 
Indeed (as long as you have e2fsprogs => version 1.39-1 and a recent kernel afaik), pretty much a simple case of:

lvextend -L+10G /path/to/my/logicalvolume
resize2fs /path/to/my/logicalvolume

Although your should really fschk 1st. Unless it's XFS, but XFS can't be shrunk.
 
Any reason for not just chucking the install in one / partition (like what I do)!! I could understand seperate partitions if you didn't want the /var on an SSD say... Whats the merit of chopping a Linux install up (on same HD)? Data security or something - right?

Also I don't usually bother with a swap file either (having 4Gb of RAM) but I suppose it depends what are you are planning to do with your rig...

Thanks
Bob
 
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