Quick question about partitioning

[RockLobster]

Hi All

Fairly new to Linux. I'm installing Arch Linux when creating the partitions should they be primary or logical partitions? Here's the setup I'm going for: -

32 MB ext2 /boot partition
256 MB swap partition
7.5 GB root partition
/home partition with the remaining space

 

[RockLobster]

Think I've found my answer basically you are only allowed a maximum of 4 primary partitions so if I just wanted the above I could just have all of them primary but I am limiting myself. One more thing I notice more and more that people aren't bothering with a boot partition. What is the boot partition for?

 

[Ringiho]

Normally at work, for Redhat/Fedora, we use this:

/boot - 100mb
swap - Match RAM size up to 2GB, after that half RAM size. So 4GB would be 2048mb swap.
/ - remaining space.

Up to you though!

 

[eXor]

One more thing I notice more and more that people aren't bothering with a boot partition. What is the boot partition for?

Every partition on my system is fully encrypted, except the boot partition.

If I didn't have a separate boot partition, the boot loader wouldn't be able to mount the encrypted root partion and load the kernel image.

 

[pingwing]

Oh yeah i forgot you cant boot encripted partitions....

Anyway the boot partition in gentoo is by default (well if you follow the handbook) hidden so once you boot your kernel no one can mess about with it inadvertently...

You can have up to 128 partitions on a drive (maybe a few less) but only 4 primary. To get the the bigger amount you use one of your primary partition slots as an extended partition, where you allocate the end of your disk as "one" extended partition which can then be sub devidided into many smaller partitions.

For me, iv become lazy and full of bad habits (well i only use linux to play at the moment as uni's been hard work) so i tend to make a big / partition and have pretty much everything on that (8gig of ram doesnt really need swap).

On the swap size id keep it to the same as your ram as that is what is needed for running power saving modes in linux (i think!)