[SLUG] Re: Partitions

[Bob Garrood]

Hi 
John wrote  "
Where I was going to look is here: The LPI tells you to set up about
six or seven partitions, ideally, so I did and I used the sizes they
recommended and FC4 went WTF? so I doubled the sizes and then I think
I had to double them again to get sensible responses. Now I'm getting
problems sometimes if I open lots of images in The Gimp, I get lots of
'can't save, media full' type messages which I presume is down to
where I put the Gimp's cache file because if I ignore all those I can
proceed OK, including saving the files when I'm done.

I'm just wondering if download is hitting a partition size issue,
although I haven't noticed it work with small files and not with
larger ones.

Also, I wasn't rushing to solve it because the next few weeks of LPI
is all about disc and partition management so I thought I'd work
through that first .. I don't even know atm how to check how much of
each partition is being used.      "

I can't help with details, but when I installed last summer, following advice 
in a manual, I created 3 partitions,  for  /   ,  /usr/local/  and /home.   
In theory, when I upgrade my installation my user files remain in place 
in /home, and all my later downloaded software, which is not part of the 
original distribution remains where it has carefully been installed 
in /usr/local.

The problem with this is downloading big things like OpenOffice.org that 
install where they want to go.  OOo puts them all over.   Using Slackware 
packages, my easiest option, also puts things all over.  My theory is that 
the advice about creating lots of partitions like /usr/local/ has become out 
of date recently, and that if you want to use package management tools then 
you have to put up with just one big partition (perhaps plus 1 for /home). .  

Bob