[Gllug] starting X

[Ian Northeast]

Alex Hudson wrote:

> Partitioning of disks is fairly evil, and I personally don't buy the
> separate /, /home, /usr, /opt, etc. without good reasons. Generally, I only
> have two partitions - / and swap. It's sometimes useful to partition
> further, but I don't think the arguments can be made for the general case.

Have you never had a power failure? Or a kernel panic for some other
reason?

Partitioning is a *good* idea. Put only what has to be in / in /, i.e.
what is needed to boot. Then if an accident happens, it doesn't become a
disaster. / should be "read mostly". For instance, if you have a power
failure, /var is likely to be damaged, as it is dynamic, i.e. written a
lot. If /var is part of /, then / is damaged. /var corruption is easy to
recover. / corruption isn't.

The same argument applies, to different degrees, to the others. You
could argue that /usr should be reasonably static and therefore eligible
for not mounting, but not /home. /home usually contains user data and is
therefore uncontrollable. /opt is for whatever you use it for so this
varies. Personally I use it as an equivilent to /usr for stuff that
doesn't come with the distribution. I don't insist on this.

I always split off /tmp too, for the same reason.

Is this not a good reason to partition?

Regards, Ian

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