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What partitions do you use?

Just wondering how you people are partitioning your drive for linux. I know how to actually do the partition I am just wondering what and how many partitions you think are best with respect to what you are running.I will give points to whoever draws the path that is closest to my ideas on partitioning

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philiph_elvis

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jlevie

I don't go to quite that extreme, but I do break up the system into more than one giant / partiton.

Typically I use:

/ of about 1000-200Mb
/var of about 100-300Mb
/opt of about 1000-2000Mb
/home rest of the disk

The idea is that the stuff that comes off the OS CD (and those packages installed via rpm's) go onto the / partition. Once set up, the / partition is pretty static and won't change that much in a running system. After you've done a few installs you'll pretty much know about how big it needs to be. Unless you've got a problem with the 1024 cylinder boundary (and you ought not to for those sizes), I see no point in splitting / into / & /usr. When disks weren't all that reliable and dynamic libs didn't exist it made sense as / held just enough to boot single user so you could fix other things. Just about everything now is dynamically linked and if you don't have a useable /usr/lib (and didn't have to foresight to build your own static utils) single user mode isn't an otion.

/var is pretty obvious. How big it needs to be depends on what you are logging and if the system is an email and/or print server. On a large email or very active print server it's good to further subdivide /var into /var & /var/spool.

There are a number of things that aren't all that OS version dependent (Netscape, Acrobat Reader, StarOffice, Apache, etc) and don't necessarily need to be re-installed following a minor OS upgrade or re-install. I like to put as much of that sort of stuff as possible in /opt. Sometimes that means building from sources or forgoing an rpm in favor of a tarball, but it helps lots to not have to re-install those items all the time.