[ale] Partitions

[hirsch at zapmedia.com]

Leonard Thornton writes:
 > OK, I admit it.....I'm lazy.  I also like to keep things very simple. 
 > On a personal machine (home variety), I have 3 Linux partitions:  
 > 
 > /boot 20Mb
 > <swap> 256Mb (256Mb memory in machine)

Double that.  Swap should be twice physical memory, in general.  This
is even more true of the 2.4.x kernel where x is less than 10.  This
is still shipped by most distributions, I believe.  With those
kernels, you get almost no benefit until swap is bigger than ram.

 > / (remainder of 8Gb drive).  
 > 
 > That's all....I have not found a good reason on a home machine to futher
 > partition the drive for /usr, /home, /var, etc....

If you are going to keep the machine around for a while, I strongly
urge you to put /home on a separate partition.  I have had so many bad
upgrade experiences that I've learned to expect to do a freash install
every couple years.  Somtimes I just want to change distributions, or
install multiple ditributions.  In any of these cases having /home on
a separate partition is a life saver.

You also might want to consider separation /usr/local and /opt for
similar reasons.  You can keep your custom installed software after a
reinstall/dist switch.

--Michael

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