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I've put together a box, got Linux installed, (several times) and it's running. Well, it runs until I do something stoopid, and blow it up. Learning by trial-and-terror, I guess. Anyway, each time I install Linux, I configure the drives differently. I've got 2 2gig SCSI3 and 2 8gig IDE. One of those IDEs (hdb)is being dedicated to DOS, so VMWares will have a place to put a MS OS, for video-capture purposes, only. I swear!
Basically, I know 'how' to partition, but I've very little idea 'what' to partition. I'd like to know what the optimal configuration of the partitions would be: for one 8gig IDE33, and two 2gig SCSI3. I'm going to be using the box for basically 'everything'. So far, the only constants are that the /boot partition (30M, 'cause I'm going to play with the kernel) is first in line on hda and both sda and sdb have a 64 meg swap at the beginning of them. (Is that right for 384m of ram?) What I'm wondering is where to put the other partitions so that the ones that get accessed/written to more often are on the SCSIs and the IDEs handle the storage. So I've got /home, /usr, /var, /tmp, etc., etc., and only a vague notion that the /var should be on one of the fast ones, for log files and such. Where should I put them, and how big should I make them? Does what I've got so far sound about right? I'm just trying to find one configuration I can set and leave alone through the inevitable (what's this button do?...BLAM!) re-installs. It's not that dire of an emergency, but it's bugging the heck out of me. Like a paper cut that won't go away. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Of course, the more detailed, the better. If you have any questions, please let me know, and I'll answer them.
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,600
Rep:
kires,
Kudos for wanting to learn about partitioning. I think too many people just make one huge / because that is the easy way out. Of course some people don't even realize that they should break things up. Personally I usually go with the following partitions. /, /usr, /var, /tmp, /home, and /boot. I will sometimes also make a /usr/local and on this machine there is a /mysql. With 12 gigs you have a lot of slack to play with. With 384M RAM you should never hit swap so what you have there is fine. I would do something like this:
/ - 1 GB IDE
/boot - 30M
/usr - 4GB IDE
/tmp - 256M SCSI
/var - 256M SCSI (unless you plan on putting MySQL databases in here)
/home - 2GB SCSI
You also may want to make a /video or a /mp3 with the rest of your IDE drive.
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