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<H4>By James T. Dennis,
<a href="mailto:linux-questions-only@ssc.com">linux-questions-only@ssc.com</a><BR>
LinuxCare,
<A HREF="http://www.linuxcare.com/">http://www.linuxcare.com/</A>
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<H3 align="left"><img src="../../gx/dennis/qbubble.gif"
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>Partitioning Linux</H3>
<p><strong>From Kurt Radecke on Mon, 18 Sep 2000
</strong></p>
<p align="right">Answered by: Heather Stern</p>
<P><STRONG>
Help, saw some info you posted on linuxdoc.org.
</STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG>
I am new to Linux.
</STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG>
I have a 15Gig drive. What is the best way to partition it: I am using
Redhat 6.2 and the manual says to setup a swap, boot and "<TT>/</TT>" partition.
</STRONG></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
I like to recommend:
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE><dl>
<dt>/tmp
<dd>100 to 300 Mb, depending on kinds of things you do that might
flood tempspace. Even 400 is not unreasonable, if you have lots
of disk to burn.
<br>
<dt>/var
<dd>This place holds system logs, the packaging system databases, your
incoming mail spool, and your outgoing mail and print spools. That
means it can overflow pretty quickly if not kept seperate.
Even on a small system I don't like this to be too small (usu 250 Mb
is okay for a minimum - but if space is that cramped I also turn off
a lot of logging).
<br>
<dt>/boot
<dd>10 or 20 Mb near the front of disk for your kernel(s). This way
you can mount 'em read only
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/smily.gif" ALT=":)"
height="24" width="20" align="middle">
<br>
<dt>/
<dd>distros vary quite a bit about how small you can get away with this being,
but I don't advise less than 200 Mb (unless you're putting something
together by hand, or only installing "base" without all the cool
stuff). If you <em>are</em> crafting something by hand you can get this
fairly tiny by using an initial ramdisk. 500 or 600 Mb is about as large
as I'd go.
<br>
<dt>swap
<dd>This is where the changeable portion of working processes are kept
when they're not the active critter and there's no room to keep them
live anyway. How much you need depends on how serious a multitasker
you are. Personally I set it around 100 Mb per drive in my system.
<br>
<dt>/usr
<dd>can be seperate if you like... in which case I usually make <TT>/home</TT>
a symlink to <TT>/usr/local/home</TT> so it goes there. If I were going to
use "grow" to use up the rest of the disk - this would be where.
</dl>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
You can stretch any of these to be larger but <TT>/tmp</TT> and <TT>/var</TT> grow
useless after a while - and swap is usually dog slow after about
twice RAM, so I wouldn't use more than 1.5 times RAM.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P><STRONG><IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" ALT="(?)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
Also, what are your thoughts on installing <A HREF="http://www.gnome.org/">GNOME</A> or <A HREF="http://www.kde.org/">KDE</A>. I have a P75
machine.
</STRONG></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
You can use both; I mix and match them with afterstep apps, GTK apps that
don't use GNOME, and tcl stuff fairly freely. Sometimes K has a better
tool, sometimes GNOME... but both environments can eat a surprising amount
of RAM because their core libraries are large, and it's possible they may
be affected by your older processor, too.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
If you find yourself strapped for memory space use a lightweight theme
(or switch to a wm that doesn't use themes) and avoid massive tools like
netscape or emacs in favor of lighter ones like gzilla and lynx for browsing,
nedit for editing (hey, it's under GPL now, that's cool), and an occasional
TCL/TK app.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P><STRONG><IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" ALT="(?)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
Thanks for your help.
</STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG>
Kurt
</STRONG></P>
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<H5 align="center"><a href="http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html"
>Copyright &copy;</a> 2000, James T. Dennis
<BR>Published in the <I>Linux Gazette</I> Issue 58 October 2000</H5>
<H6 ALIGN="center">HTML transformation by
<A HREF="mailto:star@tuxtops.com">Heather Stern</a> of
Tuxtops, Inc.,
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