[sclug] Partitioning schemes

[Keith Edmunds]

On Sun, 29 Feb 2004 11:30:00 +0000
Will Dickson <wrd at glaurung.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> The new installation is going to be a Suse 9 / W2K dual 
> boot

[snip]

> 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

So where were you planning to install Win2K? Although I think I know
what you mean, it's a little confusing to refer to "G:" as "/home/me",
but I assume that you mean the partition that is currently "G:". 

> Thus the simplest approach is to have a huge / and let them 
> get on with it.

I agree with that. On all the servers and workstations I manage, /,
/usr and /opt are all in the same partition. From a server perspective,
I always put /var in its own partition because that is where logfiles
go, and I don't want an unexpectedly large log file filling up the root
partition, but this may not be so important for you.

> 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.

I would definitely not do that. Firstly, because it is very unorthodox
and it will break something somewhere, but more because it is
unnecessarily complicated.

You don't say how large your disk it, but if I were in your situation
I'd do something like this:

/dev/hda1 - 2-5Gb - Windows plus games
/dev/hda2 - 5-10Gb - /
/dev/hda3 - 512Mb-1G - swap
/dev/hda5 - 2-5Gb - /var
/dev/hda6 - rest - /home

That may not be entirely appropriate for you, but it's a starting point
at least.

HTH.

Keith