Help with Partitioning

[wadesmart]

10172006 0900 GMT-6

I am a linux beginner. (somewhat)
I used the guided partition setup.
I have downloaded the alternate ubuntu cd.
I am working on the partitions.
Im setting them manually.
I have received some help on partition setup up till now but I need just a bit of help on this next step.
This is what I have:

IDE1 master (hda) - 203.9 GB Maxtor
#1 primary 98.7 MB B f ext3 /boot
#2 primary 10.0 GB f ext3 /
#5 logical 501.7 MB f ext3 /swap
#6 logical 40.0 GB f ext3 /home
#7 logical 10.0 GB f ext3 /second - this is for another OS to play with

1) I have seen several examples of reiserfs for home and temp. And its also been suggested I might try xfs.
2) I have set this up correctly?
3) Do I need to manually create /tmp /usr /var /srv /opt/? or will these be created automatically?

On #1 I have the boot flag turned on. Is this the only partition I must turn it on or do I need to turn it on the root as well?

Thanks

wade

[kilgoretrout]

1. The type of filesystem you choose is up to you. ext3 is fine and generally used in production environments. There is nothing wrong with reiserfs either. xfs use to have some problems with bootloaders so people wouldn't use it for /boot, but I believe that is no longer the case. There are also some reported problems with filesystem corruption with xfs and the recent 2.6.17 kernels so you may want to be careful with that.

2. There is nothing wrong with your setup. It really depends on what you are doing. For someone new, I would usually recommend a simpler setup. For desktops, you can use just two partitions, one for swap and the second one for everything else and it will run fine. A lot of people use three partitions, /, /home and swap. That has some advantages when upgrading as you can usually save your /home partition and not lose all your settings. For a server I would usually have a seperate partition for /var as this can really fill up in a server but that is totally unecessary for a desktop. In a multiuser environment, you would usually have a separate /home or maybe even a separtate /home/[username] for each user for ease of administration and security. If you plan to dual boot with windows, you would normally have a separate FAT32 data partition so you can easily share data between windows and linux.

3./tmp /usr /var /srv /opt/ will be directories in your root partition unless you setup separate partitions for them, in which case each of those directories will become the mount points for their respective partitions. Also, you do not have to mark the boot flag on any partition if you don't want to; linux can boot off of anything, even logical partitions. There's no harm in doing so however.

I can understand your angst over partitioning but you are really making this more complicated than it has to be for your purposes. I really think you would be better off with a simpler setup of two partitions, one for swap and one for everything else or a three partition setup of /, /home and swap and leave the other space for your experimental OS unallocated for the present.

[wadesmart]

10172006 1100 GMT-6

I normally would go with the simpler install.
Im not booting with any Windows OS again.
I have been asked to learn BSD so I wanted a second ( /second) partition for that.

On more question. I have read both ways on the swap size.
I have 768mb of ram. Is 500mb enough?

wade

[faulkner132]

The rule of thumb recommended for your swap size is 1.5 times your amount of RAM.

[kilgoretrout]

BSD has to be installed on a primary partition IIRC. So your planned setup wouldn't work for that, i.e. putting bsd on the logical drive hda7. Also, some flavors of BSD use to have to have a boot partition within the 1024 cylinder limit so that would require installation on the first primary partition. Here's a somewhat dated article on dual booting linux and BSD to give you an idea of the types of issues you can run into:

http://geodsoft.com/howto/dualboot/combine.htm#linux

[wadesmart]

10182006 GMT-6

This is what I did.

IDE1 master (hda) - 203.9 GB Maxtor
#1 primary 98.7 MB B f ext3 /boot
#2 primary 10.0 GB f ext3 /
#5 logical 1.0 GB f swap swap
#6 logical 40.0 GB f ext3 /home
#7 logical 10.0 GB f ext3 /second

This is the result of $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 9.2G 2.1G 6.7G 24% /
varrun 375M 80K 375M 1% /var/run
varlock 375M 4.0K 375M 1% /var/lock
udev 375M 124K 375M 1% /dev
devshm 375M 0 375M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 375M 19M 357M 5% /lib/modules/2.6.15-27-386/volatile
/dev/hda8 74G 129M 70G 1% /backup
/dev/hda1 89M 23M 62M 27% /boot
/dev/hda6 37G 132M 35G 1% /home
/dev/hda7 9.2G 129M 8.6G 2% /second

Ok. Did I make a mistake here?

[faulkner132]

After looking at what you are trying to do, I am really scratching my head. The only real reason to have this many partitions would be if you were running a server and wanted to segregate disk space so one process doesn't potential eat your entire drive.

If you are just creating a workstation/home computer, you should really only have 3 partitions:
/ = at least 8 GB I would say
/home = everything left after / and your swap
swap = at least 1.5 * your amount of RAM (I always go over just in case I add more RAM)

Even easier is to just use one partition for /. This will include everything (os, programs, and user data), you just need to make sure you back up your /home folder before upgrading/changing distros.

[wadesmart]

10182006 438 GMT-6

faulkner132, here is what I want to do.
I will have ubuntu 6.06LTS.
I want a seperate /home directory. I have 4.6GB of mail that I want safe.
I want a seperate partition so I can work on another OS.

I was told I had to create a boot partition for two OS's.

Im really new with manual partitions so that is why Im asking.

Wade

[faulkner132]

I don't see any reason you can't boot from a directory on the same partition as /. I've never actually done it, so I could be wrong, but you do specify a partition and boot directory to use in GRUB.

OS1 could be /boot
OS2 could be /boot2

Just set up GRUB to point the the appropriate directory... the partition numbers would be the same.