[Techtalk] How should I partition the hard drive?

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Thursday 30 October 2003 06:44, TechChiq wrote:
> I'm getting ready to go 100% linux (right now I have a dual-boot
> win98/Linux). I'm looking for advice on how best to partition the hard
> drive. I plan to wipe everything out and install just Linux.

Good on you.  I must get around to doing the same thing.  The last time I 
booted into native Windows (as opposed to under VMWare) was to help test out 
a Cygwin/XFree issue with dual-head displays.  I think that was over 12 
months ago.

$df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             4.9G  4.1G  556M  89% /
/dev/hda8              26G   16G  8.3G  66% /home
/dev/hda7             981M  245M  686M  27% /tmp
/dev/hda3             2.0G  916M  953M  50% /usr/local
/dev/hda5             2.0G  398M  1.5G  22% /var

I've used something like the above setup for several years now.  (Swap is not 
shown of course.)

My general rule of thumb is, if something other than root can write to it, it 
goes on its own a non-root partition.

I also put /usr/local on a separate partition too, and anything installed from 
source goes there.  I put modified config files in /usr/local/etc and symlink 
them to /etc.  It makes a clean re-install or upgrade a breeze.  I have done 
a clean re-install and had everything back to how it was within 15-20 minutes 
of the actual install finishing.

For more info, you could have a look at 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/index.html.  However, the HOWTO is quite 
old now, and shows it age.  Of course searching the archives is a good idea, 
as Hamster has suggested.  But I had a quick google search of the archives 
myself, and although I'm sure the info is in there somewhere, it wasn't 
jumping out at me, so I thought I'd post the above.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +10 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net