Partition help

[Robert L Cochran]

Leo Donahue wrote:

> I need help installing Fedora Core 3 on my laptop.
>  
> My goal is to learn Linux enough to stop using windows.
>  
> I have win2k on my laptop.  PIII ~900MHz. 512MB ram. 20GB hard drive.  
> Currently win2k only has 10001MB of my hard drive.  Under windows, 
> there is another primary partition that is unformatted.
>  
> I inserted the FC3 cd and rebooted.  I got to the point where the 
> Anaconda wizard tries to partion the remaining portion of my hard 
> drive for me.  I get an error that says something about not being a 
> primary partition or something.  So I use Disk Druid to setup the 
> partitions like the Book I'm using suggests.
>  
> I'm reading the text by Sobell, "Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux".
>  
> The text suggests the following for partions:
>  
> /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
>  
> Well you've probably already guessed that the / account is too small, 
> I get an uncaught exception error that says I should have had 2515MB 
> of space for the root partition.  There are three choices, if I 
> remember correctly and I chose "OK", which froze the laptop and I hard 
> to do a hard boot to restart the laptop.  
>  
> I am only installing the default packages to learn what is there 
> before I do a custom install.
>  
> Can someone recommend a better partion schema for an approximate 10 GB 
> hard drive?
>  
> I would appreciate the list's help.
>  
> Thanks.

The only item I have an involved partitioning scheme set up for is one 
of my web servers. And that was really unnecessary, I think I just did 
it as a play thing.

Here is what I reccomend to you:

1. Make sure your laptop has the most recent BIOS on it.
2. Put in the install CD, and let the installer program (anaconda) 
decide on all the partitioning for you. Just be sure you point it at the 
free space you have.
3. Finish the rest of the install.

You are probably more interested in working with OpenOffice and all the 
other things Linux is about than in calculating partition sizes. Let 
Disk Druid do that.

10 Gb is a decent amount of space and like the other posters have said, 
it should work well for you. My own laptop only has a 6 Gb hard drive, 
and at the moment it is down to 491 Mb of free space, so I'm looking 
around for a new hard drive for it. It has taken several years for me to 
get to the space squeeze I have now.

Bob Cochran