On Friday 22 November 2002 03.44, Bruce Marshall wrote:
Hmmmm My opinions are to do just the opposite. Here's what I responded to another person who asked me off list about my partition sizes. (opinions included)
Most of my disks are larger than 20GB with the exception of one machine that has two 18GB disks. I always try to have enough disk space to be able to install two versions of linux, say SUSE 7.3 and 8.0.
When a new version comes along, I *always* do a new install, never an update. I've done that for years... When 8.1 came along I decided "what the H" and did an upgrade... and within a day I was doing a complete re-install of 8.0. 8.1 didn't work for me and if I had followed my own rules, I would have avoided a ton of work. I will never ever update a working installation again. (but I digress)
My update 8.0->8.1 went well. I have upgraded three systems now, and I haven't seen any problems at all. That, to me, was the most impressive aspect of 8.1.
On my 8.0 System:
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 7131416 3309424 3459728 49% / /dev/sda5 23302 4651 17448 22% /boot /dev/sda10 1002886 361883 589195 39% /ftparea /dev/sdb5 1620736 1073732 464676 70% /home /dev/sdb7 3072383 2285800 627504 79% /vmware SWAP 800MB 49MB
The above is in linux 'df' format which will give you an idea of sizes and of space used but basically:
SWAP on a 768MB ram system I have about 800MB SWAP. Right this minute I have about 49MB used of swap... and that's using KDE, and StarOffice, and VMWARE (about 200mb) and two browsers. So for your use, I doubt if you should have more than that. 500MB would probably do it.
This depends heavily on what you use your computer for. People on this list have talked about video editing and other tasks that could potentially require several gigabytes of swap. On the other hand, on my system with 512MB RAM, and using it for pretty much the same as you (KDE, SO, vmware), I haven't seen a need for any swap at all.
HOME - I have about 1.GB allocated but only 1GB used... and I have a lot of JPEG files on that and also all the files for a web site or three. Start with 1GB or even less.
My /home is 24GB and 95% full :)
ROOT (/) I would try 5GB and 6GB would be plenty. And with Partition Magic, you can modify any of the sizes with no big deal if one of them turns out to be too small.
When I install everything from the SuSE cds (not really everything, but you know...) I end up with about 5.5GB of software on /. You probably want to leave a little extra room for log files, unless you have a separate partition for /var
BOOT - 16MB would be plenty. The original recommendation was for 23...
These days there's no need for a separate /boot at all, unless you have a very old BIOS.
Partition Magic is a good tool.... and over the years I have strictly avoided using the linux tools to make new partitions. Why? Sometimes Linux can move things around in the partition table that upsets the Windows world... In otherwords, Linux can break windows. I've seen it happen. Using PM will avoid this.
My experience has been that partition magic can't be trusted with anything other than windows partitions. I haven't used the latest versions so that may have changed, but the older versions have ruined more than one linux partition for, so I rely on fdisk which has always come through for me
To each his own... and whatever works for you, use it.
Agreed