Best partitioning scheme [solved]

[Phantom]

I know that the answer would be different for everybody but there are some parts that I don't understand.

 

If I install software from RPM's, would these go under /usr/share/... or .... ?

 

If that is the case then I would need to leave a rather big part of the disk for /usr, with the rest looking like this :

 

Disk: 60GB

 

/boot : 200Mb

/ : 5GB

/var : 5GB

/tmp : 1GB

/usr : 15GB

/home : 23GB (Here would be my Cedega C:\ Drive and the Vmware stuff also)

 

I have an external disk of 250GB USB2 that would be mounted as

 

/docs : 50GB

/video : 100GB

/music : 50GB

/backup: 50GB

 

/backup would be used for automatic daily incremental backups of the complete system.

 

What do you think ?

 

the use of the system:

 

Normal daily use; web, music, office, ....

DVD editing

testing all the goodies of the Linux world

 

Edited May 29, 2005 by Phantom

[Havin_it]

As you have so much space to play with, I wouldn't do too much partitioning. You may find, in time, that one category outgrows the partition you set for it.

 

IMHO the only area worth keeping in its own partition is /home, where your user docs and configs typically live. This way you can reinstall the system and keep that personal stuff intact. If your big external drive is not housing any system stuff (and there are a number of reasons why that would be silly), don't partition it, just divide it into directories, so you have the 'stretch' factor when one directory (video for instance) gets very big.

 

/usr does contain program files (and a few configs) that are accessible to all users, but I'm not aware of a strong argument for keeping this separate either, since it is all system-wide stuff and will be reinstalled pretty much as-is with the OS.

 

Of all the system directories, /etc is the dir I most often find myself customising, so there will often be stuff in there worth saving, but having the whole thing in a partition is a bad idea, as you may well run into incompatibilities if you install a new distro - certain things won't match. Just back-up /etc so you can cherry-pick from files that you may need to restore/edit.

 

Remember also the usefulness of symlinks. Say your external drive has the folders you suggested for video, music etc. Their base position in the filesystem would be something like

 

/mnt/usb1/video

/mnt/usb1/games

 

and so on. But you can create symlinks in your home dir to point to them, so even if you've put /home in a small local partition, through these it can enjoy the full size of the big drive.

 

(You could even mount /home or /home/yourname as the root of the external drive, then the paths to your stored videos, games etc. can be as simple as ~/video, ~/games etc.)

[Phantom]

thanks for the help.

 

I was also worried about having to many partitions, under M$ I never made any, I just kept 2 drives, 1 for OS + APPS and 1 for DATA + GAMES.

 

I think, I'm gonna keep it all under 1 partition with the exception of /tmp who could get fragmented over time.

 

Using the external drive for /home doesn't sound such a good idea as I wouldn't have my configurations available while being on the road (rememeber I use a laptop).

 

I have it all nicely up and running now, only sorting out some details.

 

Linux has completely convinced me now, there is no need to keep M$ around for both Personal and Pro use.

[ianw1974]

The best, and simplest IMO, is to have the following (this is how it's set on my laptop):

 

/ - The most space, because of software installs, etc.

Home - For my files

Swap - No bigger than 500MB

 

The reason for Home, is that if you upgrade your system, and something goes wrong, you can remove / and install from scratch, leaving Home intact, and not losing what you stored here. Installing apps again, isn't too big a problem.

 

You can, and I have, also had a setup with just:

 

/ - Same as above

Swap - Same as above

 

No Home area, this time. Is a risk if you upgrade, can always copy it off, and put it back later once it's all up-and-running.

 

In terms of defragging, I remember reading somewhere that you didn't need to worry about defragging in Linux (unless what I read isn't correct). So you wouldn't necessarily need to worry about keeping /tmp separate.

[polemicz]

There is no real reason for most people to have more than /, /usr and /home, although I also have a separate partition for all my data files. I have never needed more than 1GB for / and 3 GB for /usr, but /usr will depend on just how much software you install and many people use a lot more, but not 15 GB. 15GB for /usr will just be a lot of empty space. If you are going to check out other distros you will probably want to keep your stored data on a partition other than /home. And yes, fragmentation is not an issue in Linux.

[scarecrow]

Simplest and probably best is ONE ext3 or ReiserFS partition for everything, plus one swap file- or if you have plenty of RAM (about one gig) no swap file at all.

But for certain systems you may need to create separate partitions for /var, /opt, /home, /usr, and /tmp (although at current distros /tmp is exclusively managed at userspace and doesn't need a separate partition).

[Phantom]

Ok, so I'll partition like:

 

Internal:

 

40GB for /

20GB for /home where I can have a temp area for DVD editing

 

External

 

200GB on /data

50GB on /backup

 

 

Thanks for the input everyone

[polemicz]

I think that 40GB for / is going to lead to a huge waste of space. Is there some particular reason you think you need so much? If you need a lot for /tmp then set up a separate partition for it and see what it uses. If you intalled every package available /usr probably won't go beyond 8GB. On my system / and /usr total less than 3GB. Also as scarecrow said go with ext3 or Reiser.

[Phantom]

Well last time I used to automatic partitioning during install and it set up

6GB for /

1GB for tmp

1,6GB for SWAP

50GB for /home

 

With this sheme I ran out of diskspace on /

 

I'm in the process of discovering loads of tools and apps for Linux so I install loads of them, both with Gnome and KDE.

 

Also count that I'll be installing Cedega/Point2Play with a couple of games that take up some space:

Warcaft3+TFT = 1.5GB

UT2004 = 5GB

BF1942 + addons = 3.5GB

HL2 + steam = 3GB

 

I'll be running also VMWare for both WinXP (6GB) and maybe some testing on other distro's or I might install other distros on a seperate partition on my external drive and use the USB boot capability of the lappy.

 

For the rest I need at least 7GB free for video editing.

 

Other major apps: maybe CrossOver

 

Otherwise loads of little stuff that I'm testing from the URPMI sources and KDE-APPS.

[AussieJohn]

Just out of curiosity, what are you installing that you need a huge /usr of 15gb.

With a / of 5gb you have more than enough space for /usr to be under the / partition.

Do yourself a favour and delete the separate /usr partition the next time you reinstall and use the space for something else. Ideally /usr should be wiped when reinstalling to make sure that the reinstall is clean and clear. This is automatically done when /usr is a part of /.

 

You also do NOT need a special partition for /var or /tmp. A normal install does that anyway under /.

All you are doing is creating a load of separate Partitions, most of which will only have a small amount of data in them yet the remaining space too small for anything significant. Sum total ??? a load of wasted space.

All you need is the / at 5 06Gb, /Home of about 5 or 6gb for a single user account or 8 to 10 for a couple of accounts. The 512mbs for swap is AOK.

 

The balance of the hard drive you could perhaps divide up into example Music (and or Video), Pictures (and or graphics), Special data (files, saved rpms and or tars and so on). If you do a lot of video stuff you could make the Music one the biggest of the lot.

 

My Music partition is the largest and so I created a Folder titled K3B cache. When ever I am doing burning with k3b, it then has virtually unlimited cache for its uses but the cache mostly spends its time empty, being only temporarily used during the burning process.

 

When I first started, I was like every other newbie in thinking I needed loads of specially created partitions for best results because I saw /var, /temp, and so on. I now know that this is not the case. It doesn´t help Mandriva to work one iota better at all. All you do is create a lot of unnecessary and pointless work for yourself.

 

Cheers. John

[Phantom]

Thanks John.

 

Funny still that the partition utility automaticaly starts to create partitions for every subdir it needs.

 

I thought also that it would become a waist of space but wasn't sure it this was the way it was ment to be under linux distro's.

Even when googling for some examples I only found people that were seperating everything in partitions.

 

Many stated that having a seperate one for /var and /tmp was good to avoid fragmentation.

Now, I don't know how fragmentation is with EXT3 or REISERFS ??

[AussieJohn]

That fragmentation thing is a myth and comes from windows users assuming that Linux does things the same way as windows does. It does not. It is in the same class as the software being sold to windows users to defragment the memory. Duh.

 

Why they would select /var and /temp to make this statement is beyond me. Temp is just that and can be emptied without really effecting anything and /Var on my machine has stuff that is similar to other files elsewhere. Use of ext3 and reiserfs is a personal choice because they both achieve the same thing namely the ability to save data in the event of an improper shutdown such as a crash and so on. reisofs users claim that it is also a faster system but the jury is still out on that one.

Another example of a difference with windows is that when you have a large number of files you have to keep selecting sort by name to get them sorted alphabetically. In linux even though you might select sort by type or any of the other choices, or cut and paste or copy and paste the files are always automatically arranged alphabetically. Not so in windows.

 

The various Mandriva partitions you mentioned are pseudo partitions. They are really Directories. They are not Actual Physical Partitions. The / needs to be a physical partition as also does /swap and long experience recommends that /home also be one. Mandriva makes the pseudo partitions as it sees it needs for its requirements, so it can place required files in places it can easily locate and identify. No different in this respect to Windows and its ¨Program Files¨ and ¨Winnt¨ and ¨My Documents¨.

You create other physical partitions for your OWN requirements. e.g. I have a large one titled /ALLMUSIC (contains music and video clips etc), another called /ALLPICTURES ( contains photographs and graphics) and one I call /ALLMINE which contains all sundry stuff.

When I do an OS reinstall, /home , /allmine, /allmusic and /allpictures are not touched or reformatted.

 

Try not to think that Mandriva needs to be seen as highly technical by its user. It is not. Mandriva and others have worked to make it the the MOST user friendly Linux of all. Mandriva is a highly technical product near state of the art but you as a user do not have to worry about that.

Just do not think Windows when you try to learn how Mandriva/Linux works. Apart from some appearance and end results there is nothing in common. Thinking Windows how will consistently mislead you.

 

Cheers. And enjoy your Mandriva world. John.

[scarecrow]

Many stated that having a seperate one for /var and /tmp was good to avoid fragmentation.

Now, I don't know how fragmentation is with EXT3 or REISERFS ??

 

To my poor knowledge, fragmentation for filesystems with recovery journal (ext3, reiser, or even windoze NTFS) is pretty irrelevant- [performance is not affected in any way. The only case one should worry about fragmentation is ancient filesystems, like FAT32.

Picking between ext3 and reiser is really not that easy- with big files both have similar performance, but on small files Reiser is faster (significantly). On the other hand, Reiser does not have a "lost and found" option for recovering lost data after a severe crash, but this feature which is embedded on ext3 costs quite a bit of harddisk space (for volumes larger than 120 GB it can climb up to almost 8-9% of the partition space). I simply use Reiser, because I have taken care that my system does not have severe crashes that often!

[AussieJohn]

From Technical articles I have read, fragmentation does effect performance and that is the reason Microsoft eventually included a defragmentation process for Windows. Again from what I have read, NTFS does fragment but not as severely as all the other Windows running fat32.

I repeat, fragmentation in Linux is a MYTH.

Regarding ext3 and reiserfs, it is personal opinion and taste as to which to use. If ext3 was so inferior to reiserfs then it would have been dropped long ago in favour of reiserfs and there is no sign of that happening. Reiserfs supporters can roll out lots of arguments about why it is the best.

 

Cheers. John

[polemicz]

First, NTFS does fragment and I need to remind my son to do defrag on his Win XP system, better than FAT32 which is godawful. I have used Reiser from my first linux days (over three years ago) and have never had a problem.

Second, if you search posts on partioning you will see that there is rarely a need to set up a lot of partitions. The old 2:1 swap: ram deal is not valid with current memories. I have 512 of ram and rarely use swapping, although with a lot of graphics and video (as you plan) you may do some, but I assume from what you will be doing that you have plenty of ram. At most 512 swap will do.