Question

Home user partition size

Asked by: alphaomega232

I would like to set up Linux on my home system for two people,  what would you recommend as the sizes of the following partitions that I want to have: /usr   /home   /boot   /   .

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Asked On
2002-04-18 at 05:56:34ID20290890
Topic

Linux Setup

Participating Experts
2
Points
100
Comments
2

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Answers

 

by: jleviePosted on 2002-04-18 at 06:28:37ID: 6950510

That depends on what flavor and version of Linux you'll be using and what pagages and services you'll be installing. In general you should size the / (or / & usr) to be a bit bigger that what the installation requires, at least a few hundred MB more and allocate the balance to /home. And a good thing to do is to include a /var partition in your configuration so that routine disk activity isn't constantly scribbling on /.

For example, my recommendation for a RedHat 7.2 system looks something like:

/boot      20MB
/        3000MB
/var      500MB
/home  the-rest

I don't bother with splitting / and /usr. That used to pretty much be a requirement in the early days of Unix when neither the OS nor disk drives could be considered to be particularly reliable. Then idea then was the when something got hosed up you could boot single user (using only what was in /, assuming it survived) and repair the system. Also in those days systems were installed from tapes and you had to do an install to get any Unix tools of capabilities. These days the OS and disks are reliable enough that the situation rarely occurs. And even then there are alternative methods, like a bootable Linux on a floppy or CD, that can be used to repair a system.

Depending on exactly what options are chosen at install, the / file system will wind up with something like 900MB free (typical workstation install). That leaves a comfortable amount of free space for things to be added after the OS is installed (like StarOffice or OpenOffice) and it leaves room for future upgrades of the OS (operating systems always seem to grow, so the next version is almost always goint to be bigger).
 

 

by: jlmsPosted on 2002-04-22 at 07:42:14ID: 6960026

How much space do you have???

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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