On 5/9/05, Anders Johansson <andjoh@rydsbo.net> wrote:
On Sunday 08 May 2005 22:03, Andrew Williams wrote:
/opt is for 'optional software' and the distinction between /opt and /usr is pretty artificial. It may also be read-only. This also screws yast.
/opt and /usr/local are the places where third party applications go, things you compile and/or install yourself. The distribution should never touch /use/local, while they may put things in /opt.
It makes sense to put things in opt when you have large packages of software that belong together. For example KDE or gnome or openoffice.
/var contains data which can be pretty volatile. The only advantage I have ever found in making it a separate partition is that I can easily drop into Runlevel 1 and then move the contents to another partition if I feel the need.
A huge advantage with putting /var on its own partition is that it contains things which may grow very rapidly, such as logs. A system that runs out of disk space can develop serious problems. So if you have a program running amok and filling up the logs with rubbish, you don't ruin it for the rest of the system.
You also mentioned that other partitions can be mounted read-only, in which case you have to have /var on a separate partition.
Very interesting. I think that I'm going to play around with the different partitions just to get a feel for it. I have 8 gigs allocated for linux- how much should each partition get? I think that for now I will only put /home on it's own partition, but it would be nice to know for the future what all the other directories require. Thank you everybody. Dotan Cohen http://LyricsList.com/ http://Music-Liriks.com/