On Tuesday 18 September 2007 20:15, Carlos E. R. wrote:
You can simply leave space unpartitioned and decide later.
That is what, I would guess, most of experienced users do for general purpose systems. *** Separating some stuff to other partitions is beneficial for some use cases. /boot One partition for that directory alone seems not very useful. If you have multiple installations that use same /boot it will be a lot of work to keep it healthy, so you will probably not mount it under /boot. Room on hard disks is no problem today, so using one installation of operating system as default place for bootloader files can give you boot and rescue system in one. /home will allow to install new distro version and have all your settings transferred with minimum effort, but it can be source of problems: - if application settings are too different, - if default user numeric ID is changed, than it has to be fixed manually - not good for different distros, for both of above reasons, though if one uses different users for different distros than at least it is easy to access files that belong to other users as partition is already mounted. /home/user/Documents will allow to have all user work instantly available in any installation, but only KDE applications have this directory as default for data. Most of others default to $HOME and one has to direct them manually to use Documents. /tmp /var /usr will prevent system to lock due to lack of space, if they grow too much, but that is not easy to achieve on desktop. User has to ignore warnings before it happens. Servers are different story. The other benefit to separate them is that basic system does not fragment so much and it is faster. Although, the base system is installed first, and after that is added the rest, so the base system will be more or less compact even after adding and removing packages that use /usr, creating and removing temporary files, changing files in /var. *** But... Having multiple partitions is more work to plan sizes, maintain the system, add them to new installed system specially if it is different distribution. One can experience strange problems if one program attempts to use same name cache or database in /var that is common for few of them. The command rpm comes as an example. *** So, I would use openSUSE default. It seems good for desktop use. At least all installation scripts know about it and installing and removing packages will not involve manual work. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org