[Techtalk] /usr Partition

[Val Henson]

On 1/18/06, Kristine Thompson <kristineth at ameritech.net> wrote:
> How big should I set aside for /usr partition? Linux default is 6 Gig,
> and I want it bigger then 6 Gig?

This is how I have my 80GB disk partitioned:

val at goober:/usr/src$ df -hl | grep -v tmpfs
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              19G  4.1G   14G  24% /
/dev/sda6              37G  635M   35G   2% /home

Yep, I left 20GB (decimal, not binary) unpartitioned for future use. 
I'm doing some file system development, so I do that a lot.

On modern systems, it really only makes sense to have one partition
for "/" and one for "/home" - and sometimes "/boot".  The reason to
have "/home" separate is that if you have to reinstall, you can blow
away "/" but leave all your personal files intact on "/home".  The
reason to have "/boot" separate is to make it easier on the bootloader
in some cases - generally not a worry these days.  The division
between "/" and "/home" depends on how you're going to use it;
generally you should leave at least 10GB for "/". (My / is probably so
full because I've got lots of kernel trees on it... time to move them
to /home I think.)

In the old days, UNIX systems used to have a bunch of different
partitions, mainly because disks were (a) small, (b) slow.  Also file
systems were really delicate and it was nice to only have your /var
screwed up.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are still partitioning up
their modern 60GB super fast drives running ext3 like it was 1972, and
all it does is make for headaches when one partition or another fills
up.

-VAL