[sclug] Partitioning schemes

[Will Dickson]

Most companies have websites which aim to promote their 
products. I recently found myself on M$' website, and... 
well, it's time to Free my primary workstation :-)

The new installation is going to be a Suse 9 / W2K dual 
boot: W2K for the small amount of windows-specific 
development and testing I have to do, plus any games that 
really don't want to run under linux even with WineX; SuSE 
for everything else. However, I'm still considering the most 
appropriate partitioning scheme.

My current (W2K) setup goes like this:
C: W2K itself and nothing else, so that when I have to 
reinstall I minimise the amount of stuff that gets junked
D: Games
E: Apps and a collection of Java libraries used for work
F: Distribution archives of things downloaded from 'net.
G: My stuff (except the bits which insist on going in my 
Windows-provided "home" directory).

I am thinking that this will map as follows:

C: = /
D: = /opt/[games] and / or /usr/[games] - I'm not sure 
whether I'll always be able to choose
E: = /opt (nearly all the apps I care about are written in 
Java and will go where they're put)
F: = /packages (non-standard I know, but hey)
G: = /home/me

Assuming that's correct, the question I'm pondering is what 
to do about sizing /, /opt, and /usr. I have read various 
arguments that you should have a small /, but most of these 
don't seem relevant to my situation; OTOH /opt and /usr seem 
likely to grow unpredictably (eg. my UT2003 installation is 
nearly 4GB) so I definitely want them on the same partition. 
Thus the simplest approach is to have a huge / and let them 
get on with it.

Alternatively I could have a small /, a large "pool" 
partition, and symlink /usr, /opt and maybe /tmp to 
subdirectories of the pool partition. However, that's rather 
unorthodox and I'm wondering if it might break apps which 
can tell the difference and weren't expecting it.

Anyone have any comments?

TIA

Will.