I would also suggest a separate partition for /usr/local, you may not understand this now, but /usr/local is where most programs you compile yourself install. Making a partition for it makes upgrading and switching distros easier. Good luck. On 11/25/02 4:01 AM -0800, Ralph W. Reid wrote: > Glenn Ervin staggered into view and mumbled: > > > > > >I was just reading on a how-to page about getting ready for installing > >Linux. > >It mentions partitioning a hard drive, and I wanted to get some feed back on > >whether any of you wish you had done it differently. > >I have a second hard drive, which I intend on dedicating totally to Linux, > >drive D, which is 8 GB in size. > >>From what I read, it seems that I want at least 3 primary partitions. > >Unless I am mistaken, I want one to be no more than 80 MB, and one no more > >than 500 MB. > >* Should I have 4 primary partitions? > >P.S., I still have not decided which distro I am going to use, and I am > >about to get to that part of the documentation. I am considering Emacspeak > >for the speech part. > > I installed Slackware 8.0 on a system earlier this year, and made one > of the partitions a little smaller than I probably should have. The > documentation indicated that installing all of the software would > require about 2 GB as I recall, so I set up the boot partition with > about 2 GB of space. Unfortunately, this did not leave me much room > for installing large packages in the future, so I have probably set > myself up for a lot of extra hard drive repartitioning at some point > in the future. > > My talking box uses Slackware 8.0 with Speakup--a nice, smooth running > set up. I set up the boot partition on this system to be about 3.5 > GB, so I have a little room for expansion. > > Both systems have 3 partitions on them: > > 1. Boot partition--contains all of the system software and extra > utilities. I considered setting up a separate partition for /tmp, > but these systems do not get huge quantities of multiple users > playing...uhm...working all at once, so I decided that leaving it on > the boot partition would be okay for now. > > 2. /home--user accounts, ftp directory trees, and archiving. I made these partitions large because I know that given enough time, I will probably > produce a lot of data. If the root partition gets too full on either > system, I suppose I could set up some symbolic links to hidden > directories on these partitions if I need to, but that would be a > temporary fix at best--best to repartition the drive if things get > that full. > > 3. swap partition--system swap area. The documentation I read > indicated that I should make a swap partition twice the size of main > memory, up to 128 MB. Both of these systems contain 64 MB of RAM, > and I was pretty sure that little if anything would be done on either of them to force large amounts of swapping. I just wanted to get the numbers > close to what was suggested while recognizing that the exact values > were not too critical, so I wound up with 169 MB of swap on one > system, and 120 MB of swap on the other. The system with 169 MB of > swap space might be used for some simple graphics work later on, so I > felt comfortable making the swap space a little larger. Anyone who > is considering setting up swap spaces much larger than this might > want to think about how much time might be required to transfer all > of the data between main memory and the swap partition on the hard > drive--if lots of swapping is anticipated, perhaps installing some > more RAM would be a better solution. > > I hope this rambling helps a little. Have a _great_ day! > > > -- > Ralph. N6BNO. Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O. > rreid at sunset.net http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid > Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait. > SLOPE = (y2 - y1) / (x2 - x1) > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > -- Thomas Stivers e-mail: stivers_t at ev1.net PGP Public Key ID: 45CBBABD http://stivers-home.dyndns.org
