Hello Jordan, On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Jordan Evatt wrote: > One final note... How would you guys recommend partitioning a 4gb hard > drive? :) I don't really want to use one big partition, which I've been > doing for a long time, so I decided to split it up this installation. I > tried an 800mb /, 1200mb /home, 1800mb /usr, and 250mb /var (which actually > isn't big enough since downloading deb packages can take well over 300mb, > so that'll HAVE to be bigger).
First of all, I think it's a good idea not to leave /tmp on the partition where / is (As the data on / is almost static, whereas the data on /tmp changes often). So make /tmp a symbolic link to /var/tmp or create an extra partition for it. Then you will never need 800mb for /. About 100mb should be enough in most cases (I am running potato on a 1Gb hd, with a 60Mb / partition, which is not even half full, while /usr with about 600mb is filled to 95%). Concerning the size of /home, you should consider, how many users there are on the system, and what you want them to be able to do. I would say, it would be nice, if users have the possibility to store about one ISO-CD-image in their home-directory, so make /home about 700-800mb per user. If the machine can't burn CDs and there are no users working on it, who will do a lot of graphics work or say GIS, you can of course scale down the size quite a lot. Concerning /var, you are absolutely right, that 250mb is a bit small, if you want to do automatic upgrading via apt. If you want to do database stuff or do a lot of TeX-ing with fonts in different resolutions (which will fill up /var/spool/texmf) you should add some more. By the way, I think it would be nice, if someone could do something like "average compression rate" of .debs (i.e. unpacked size vs. size of the package), then one could approximately guess the right size for /var/apt/cache. Perhaps I'll look into the subject when I have a little more time. Should not be too difficult, one could use the data from the packages database and write a little perl or python script to do it. 60 mb for swap is ok, now the rest is up for /usr. Just my 0.02$. Regards, Daniel
