[H-GEN] partition advice

[Ben Carlyle]

Rob Brockway partitioned his drives like so:
> blake[12:37pm]:~>df
> Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
> /dev/hda1              15856   11910     3116     79%   /
> /dev/hda3            1189542  572591   555489     51%   /usr
> /dev/hda4             726443  453013   235908     66%   /opt
> /dev/hdb1              63885      18    60568      0%   /tmp
> /dev/hdb2             127361   77443    43341     64%   /var
> /dev/hdb3             634724  421568   180371     70%   /var/spool
> /dev/hdb4             385923  236517   129473     65%   /home

One suggestion I would like to make to alter this scheme is to increase
the size of your root partition.  I have a 16 meg root partition at home
on fuzzy%, and run into constant problems when upgrading my debian
distribution.

Debian likes to unpack files in the target directory before performing
the actual upgrade (a sensible approach), thus despite 16 meg being
just enough room for /etc, /lib, /sbin, and other vital components,
it is not enough to unpack new versions as well. I therefore suggest
reserving about twice as much space as you expect to use on the root
partition.

I suspect any distribution that relies heavily on /etc and /lib will
have similar problems.  Personally I would prefer many of these files
to be shipped to /usr/etc and /usr/lib, or some other handy location
such as rob's /opt.

For my personal machines I find that /usr is the most important for
program installs, then /home for my megs of personal data and fiddling
space.  I make /var reasonably big (you -don't- want to have a full /var),
and basically give the rest to swap and /tmp.

On a side-note, I'm sorely tempted to drop back to one
or two partitions.  I'm tired of running out of space in /home
without any simple way of altering my partition configuration
available to me.


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