# Best way to partition?

## Guzz

I've been running GNU/Linux for a while now and I'm starting to feel comfortable with it. So now I've decided to throw out Windows from my workstation. This means that I will have 46 GB for Gentoo.

Until now I've just had one ~5GB partition + swap&boot, how should I set it up with all this free space.

Should I have separate partitions for /home, /var and /usr/local? And how big should I make them?

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## salsashark

There are as many differing opinions of this as there are users, I believe.  

Here's my $.02

For my desktop/workstation I run the following with my 26Gb of drives:

(laptop has 28, home has 26, both have 512Mb of RAM)

/boot ~ 128Mb

/ ~ 8000Mb

/home ~ 17000Mb

swap ~ 768Mb

Into the /home I create /home/Music and then ln -s /home/music /music

Thus all my mp3s appear under /music, and I've got a ridiculous amount of app space.

For my work server I use most running NMIS and SNORT on RedHat (no comments!), which has 18Gb of mirrored drive and 1Gb of RAM, it looks like:

/boot ~ 100Mb

swap ~ 1000Mb

/ ~ 6000Mb

/var ~ 10000Mb

With all my databases stored in /var

It really depends on what you are going to do with the box.  Security-wise, you should keep a seperate /var, but then again, if it's your desktop, then who really cares?  You're running iptables or behind a firewall right?  As for /usr/local, I never really cared about it.  I keep all my tarballs in /usr/local/src, and if it looks like the sh*t is going to hit the proverbial fan, I just SFTP it onto another machine, just in case, so I don't have to reinstall stuff, wondering "what were the dependencies for this PERL script?" 800 times.

Just my $.02, no more, no less.

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## gilgames

Sounds like you don't have clue how much space you're going to use(waste). A good method is to use LVM so you can easily grow and shrink volumes. I use it on a 40G volume group(two 20G drives). If you're willing to use ext2 you can even resize the filesystems while they're still mounted. Daniel Robbins wrote a very good article on this subject here(http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lvm/?dwzone=linux)

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## salsashark

Like I said, my $.02, and everyone has their own opinion.

That LVM looks pretty snappy!  I only see references to ext2 and Reiser so far..  Is ext3 (I have a three-year-old who loves to hit power buttons) supported with reboot?

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## niyogi

just make one large partition if you don't know what to do  :Razz: 

/boot

/

swap 

just like the gentoo installation guide says 

-S

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## gilgames

 *salsashark wrote:*   

> 
> 
> That LVM looks pretty snappy!  I only see references to ext2 and Reiser so far..  Is ext3 supported with reboot?

 

ext2 is good, ext3 is ext2 with journaling, which means that you don't have a dreadfully longrunning fsck at reboot. Reiser knows that trick too. All have their own pros and cons. ext3 is the only fs I know that has full metadata & data journalling. Reiserfs and XFS only have metadata journaling AFAIK.

LVM is just nice way to avoid partitions. My data disks don't even have partitions, LVM uses them directly. The only thing I just can't get to work is to have my root partition on a LV. That's not much of a problem since it doesn't exceed the few gigs I had lying around, but it would be nice,fun,flexible,consistant........

 *salsashark wrote:*   

> (I have a three-year-old who loves to hit power buttons)

 

Having a cat running around can be equally thrilling   :Twisted Evil: 

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## Malakin

Except for the first time when I thought there was some point to it for a home user, I've always put everything in a single partition, maybe add a swap if you expect to use it much. 7 years of using Linux and I've never regretted doing it this way.

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## Jeevz

LVM can be pretty cool, if you are interested in it you should try it out. 

Otherwise, I would like to note having a seperate partition for /home is a good idea. I used to try many distros and this was a life saver, didn't have to worry about copying my data files. It is also nice if you just want to reinstall gentoo. For practice of course  :Cool: 

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## Guzz

Ok, thanks for your replies.

I've decided to make it as easy as possible and I'm going to partition something like this:

swap     ~512MB

/boot     ~120MB

/           ~6-8GB

/home   The rest of it.

Bye bye Windows.

//Johannes

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## bbibber

LVM is pretty cool but I don't use it for production machines yet.  I had my troubles "upgrading" my volumes from one 1.x release to another.  Besides, it conflicted (and I think still conflicts) with SGI's XFS patches if you want to patch an ordinary vanilla -kernel. 

Like the other guy said: if you don't need the additional security, go for the 1 partition scheme like it says in the docs   :Wink: 

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