[Sussex] Hello!

[Steve Dobson]

Hi Ciaran

On 25 March 2003 13:08 Geoff Teale wrote:
> Ciaran wrote:
> -------------
> > Hi all,
> 
> Hi there.. 

Hi.  I hope this is also a sign that you'll be coming along to
the MOOT this Thursday.  If you can get yourself there I can promise
you a lift home.  If neither Geoff or Dom make it EG is not that far
of my route home.
 
<snip>
> > Any ideas on a good partitioning strategy, given that my
> > computer has 256MB of RAM?
> 
> For simplicity I'd go with:
> 
> Somewhat less than 1GB for swap.
> Around 100MB for /boot (you can get by with less, but you 
> might want several
> kernels)
> Everything else as /

Call me old hat but I still believe in partioning my disk into 
more parts.  There are three reasons for this:

 1). fsck doesn't take as long,
 2). in the event of a disk crash you have a better change of getting
      so of your data back, and
 3). when the heads skip merrily across the surface of your disk it
      might not destroy as much data.

Okay - I know that two of those points are technically the same but I
believe that it is such an important point that it needs to be said
twice.

As for (1) as I use a laptop mostly my disks speeds are slower than 
most so fsck can take quite a while to work its way across the disk.
Don't notice it much while I'm running as most of the programs I use
never get swapped to disk much.

As for partioning I layout my disks something like this:
  /dev/hda1  /
  /dev/hda2  swap
  /dev/hda5  /usr
  /dev/hda6  /var
  /dev/hda7  /home
  /dev/hda8  /usr/src

I don't bother with a /boot partion - all my BISOs support a large boot
partion and I don't run any M$ software that might also have problems.

I don't have the sizes on my 30GByte disk as I'm at work but post back if
you want the sizes.  It is a good idea these days to give /var a bit of 
space as there are a number of caches that are configured to be there
esp in Debian.

If you have more than one disk - split the swap space in half and have a
swap partion on each disk.  The Linux kernel is very good in it's use of
swap space.  If one disk is busy and it needs to write a page to swap 
then it will use the other channel.  Geoff's suggestion of 1GB for swap
isn't bad.  The old rule of thumb was twice the physical - but disks are
so big these days that partions that small look stupid.

Hope to see you soon (this Thursday)

Steve