Partition help

[Thomas Cameron]

OK, let's examine the logic behind the partition scheme Sobell lays out:

/boot    100 megabytes
/        500 megabytes
(swap)   two times the amount of ram
/home    As large as necessary, depends upon # of users
/tmp     Minimum 100 megabytes
/usr     Minimum 1.7 - 5.5 GB depending what I install
/var     Minimum 500 Megabytes

/boot is where the kernel and some associated files live.  Because of PC 
BIOS limitations, the kernel *must* be within the first 1024 cylinders on 
the disk, so you should make that the first partition.

The old "make your swap twice your physical memory" thing is really just a 
suggestion - it's not set in stone.  On a laptop system with 512MB memory, I 
would be pretty surprised if you overflowed that RAM and needed a whole 
bunch of swap.  I would probably make my swap partition smaller - more like 
256-512MB.

Now normally /var is a separate partition because that's where everything 
writes log files.  If you get some weird out of controll process that starts 
writing tons of logfile entries, you want to have /var on a separate 
partition so that the OS partition doesn't fill up the system crashes.

/tmp is also used by all sorts of processes, so it is also potentially at 
risk of filling up.  Making it it's own partition isn't a bad idea.

/home is where your personal stuff will go, and it's good to have /home as a 
separate partition so that if you need to reinstall Linux you can just leave 
/home alone and it will be there when the new OS is installed.

/usr is where all the core OS stuff goes.

I wouldn't usually contradict Mark Sobell, but since you are just setting up 
a small system for educational purposes, I would do this:

/boot (200MB)
swap (512MB)
/ (the whole rest of the drive)

And here's why:  Yes, there is some small danger of logfiles or runaway 
processes filling up your root partition, but in the 10 years I've been 
running Linux I've only seen that on servers, never on a laptop.  If you do 
this then you can use all of the remaining part of your hard drive.  You'll 
never run into the situation where /home has tons of free space but you 
guessed wrong and /usr is full and you can't install new software.  In my 
opinion (which is only worth what you've paid for it), the risks are far 
outweighed by the benefit of not having to take guesses at what your disk 
usage will be.

Cheers,
Thomas