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Submitted by mborn on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 17:48.
( categories: Installation Issues )

Peace!

I have bought a new HDD (80GB) and I would like to know how may I prtition it for a Linux-only system. I have a 512MB RAM and a 3.1GHz processor. My question(s) is(are) How many MB for Swap? should I have all my Linux installed under / or should I have more partitions for /boot /home and others?

M B

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Feel Free.
Conceptor's picture
Submitted by Conceptor on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 19:24.

First of all read the partitioning Configuration:“Mount Points” Section And Partitioning in Command Line reference

Customization of your installation to meet your needs based on many factors what this installation will be for? Server, client, home user .I do not think it will be server :).

What distribution you intend to install?, if it's Mandrake it will be easy –just auto allocate and every thing will be up to you. Auto allocate for the unallocated area.

If else the swap partition should be 1.5* your memory or as maximum 2times your memory.

For the home you are the only one who knows how your /home should be.

There is a great resources here

Diaa Radwan


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Peace! Hi Diaa, I am instal
Submitted by mborn on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 20:14.

Peace! Hi Diaa, I am installing Sscietific Linux CERN http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/scientific3/ It is based on a RedHat linux Distribution but has so many scientific applications. I shall use it as a work box for doing some hard calculations and also as a Personal Computer. You can't know how much do I NOT like MS Win (all versions :) ).

I think I will make the /home the greates possible. and I believe the problem I have shall not be there. The odd is that I love to use Fedora Core 3 too, which I will install on another box (which is mine, the above is at my work).

I shall look for the solution and tell you the results.

By the way! While booting, the last line I have is marked with FAILED not OK but I could not read the message because it goes in a second. Is there any possibility with which I can see the last line which appears while booting, so I can tell you about it. How may I have screen shot of it (I know I am still booting and have not yet even strted the login process)?

Thank you for ur time,

M B

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matter of taste mostly
Alaa's picture
Submitted by Alaa on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 19:44.

this is really a matter of taste, I prefer creating many partitions.

here is how I think about partitioning.

  1. seperate files that can be recovered from the distro cds and packages from files that cannot (which means have a seperate /usr partition, if you're about to compile your own stuff have a seperate /usr/local)
  2. seperate home in order to be able to run multple installations with the same user data
  3. seperate partitions with content that changes regularly from fairly static partitions (have seperate /tmp, /var and / partitions).

swap should always be at least few megs larger than your ram, if more than double the ram size was used for swap it will slow down performance too much.

so my typical installation looks like this

  • swap - double my ram
  • / - few hundred megs
  • /usr - at least 4gigs
  • /var - about 1gig
  • /usr/local - 1gig but I try to avoid compiling software
  • /tmp - as big as swap, doesn't hurt to be bigger
  • /home - the rest

tab3an I take all this to the extreme and have different filesystems for the different partitions,

  • /home is JFS for quick journalized operation without
  • /var is ext3 for maximum stability
  • /, /usr, /usr/local are ext2 for speed since they don't change often enough to warrant journalized file systems
  • /tmp ext2 for speed since the data is not important

one could take this to further extremes by using different mounting options for each partition, ie nodev, nosuid, noexec etc depending on need.

cheers, Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"


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Peace! What a lucid explaina
Submitted by mborn on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 20:21.

Peace! What a lucid explaination. I do thank you very much for such a nice and clear ideas about it....and the piece about the file system was amazing, as usual, you are our guru man!

Diaa, your ideas are very much and warmly appreciated.

PS. Now! what about that failed process while rebooting? How may I know what is it? Is there any possibilty I can scroll down the screen to see it back after I get the text logging in screen ( i use run level 3)?

Thank you for ur time,

M B

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not here
whirlpool's picture
Submitted by whirlpool on Fri, 14/01/2005 - 20:02.
PS. Now! what about that failed process while rebooting? How may I know what is it? Is there any possibilty I can scroll down the screen to see it back after I get the text logging in screen ( i use run level 3)?

discuss it in its own thread thread. people who might find the same issue will never find the rest of the discussion


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More than excellent.
Conceptor's picture
Submitted by Conceptor on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 20:25.

I think some efforts on this comment and it will be really useful article or book page.

Diaa Radwan


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feel free to draft one
Alaa's picture
Submitted by Alaa on Thu, 13/01/2005 - 20:46.

feel free to draft that page on the wiki.

cheers, Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"


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quite an original idea
whirlpool's picture
Submitted by whirlpool on Fri, 14/01/2005 - 20:06.
I take all this to the extreme and have different filesystems for the different partition

quite an original idea.

but did you mean

# /home is JFS for quick journalized operation without

... data loss ???


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sorry
Alaa's picture
Submitted by Alaa on Fri, 14/01/2005 - 22:15.

thats without too much CPU usage.

ext3 gives you journalized but is very slow, reiser is supposedly fast (only with very small files in my experience) uses to much cpu, JFS strikes the best balance so far.

note that these are all based on my experience and with absolutly no tuning, I used whatever defaults mandrake chose for me.

cheers, Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"


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