On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 00:03, Andrew Konosky wrote: > I am thinking that I might download and install the FC3 test on my > second hard drive and I am wondering what partitioning scheme to use. I > have read that the recommended partitioning scheme is about a 2gb swap, > 100mb /boot, and whatever size for /, but I have just read some other > articles saying that /home and /usr should also be mounted on seperate > partitions so that user data and installed programs can be saved in the > event a reinstall is necessary. > If you are playing with FC3 test 1 I would not keep any critical files under that OS. As such saving /home or /usr IMHO should be a mute question. Much of this depends on what you plan to use the system for. For a true multi-user server using different mount points for various directories is a good idea as it can prevent the server from dying if one of the less critical partitions are filled up for some reason. (usually a user that generates tones of files for some reason causing / to fill up and halt the system.) For a single user system IMHO this is not as important. You can always backup the /home directory if you are doing an upgrade or re-install. So for a workstation I normally setup a /boot, swap, and / file systems with the bulk of the space in the / file system. > If the linux kernel is stored on /boot, user data & files on /home, and > installed programs go to /usr, then how big does / really need to be and > what data will that partition actually store? I have an 80gb HDD, so > space is not really an issue, but I am curious as how I should format > it. How does this look? > The biggest user of space under the above layout would be in the /var directory, specifically /var/log and /var/spool (mainly mail, mqueue). A lot of this depends on what applications you plan to run. Database servers I would setup a separate file system for the data directories. Webservers would have special partition for the various pages. A development system would have file systems for work areas and software repositories. For a personal workstation put everything under /. It will save you lots of headaches when you find that you guessed wrong and need a much larger /usr file system since you installed so many packages. > Drive 1 > swap - 2gb > > Drive 2 > /boot - 100mb > /home - 20gb > /usr - 20gb > / - whatever space is left > How much memory do you have on your system? Normally they recommend swap be twice what your memory is. I usually consider 1GB for swap the most you should ever really need regardless of how much memory you have. If you find you are using a lot of swap space then you probably need more memory as your performance is probably dropping rapidly as you use more swap. And if you ever really need more swap I believe you can add more swap partitions (at least you could under older unix systems, have not had to do that under linux yet). Not sure having /usr as a separate file system will really save you anything during a reinstall. If I was reinstalling /usr is probably one of the file systems I would want to replace completely. Again if it was a multiuser system a separate /usr makes some sense. > Also, since I already have a 2gb swap partition on my 1st HDD for my > current FC2 install, can another linux install on the second HDD use it > also (since I can only run one at a time anyway...), or must the swap > parition be on the same physical drive as the OS? > Excellent question! I can not think of any reason you should not be able to use the same swap space for two different install of linux as long as they both are not trying to use it at the same time. > And yet another question: Are there RPM packages availbe for FC3, or > will I have to install everything from source? Can the FC2 RPMs that I > have installed now be compatible? Not sure on this one. I think there is a different set of repositories for FC3. I am sure some one will respond with an authoritative answer on this one. -- Scot L. Harris webid@xxxxxxxxxx Eating chocolate is like being in love without the aggravation.
