Manual Partitioning

[Cr@ter$]

Hi, I'm very new to Linux and even newer to Kubuntu (i.e., I'm just a newb :P ) and would like to ask what would be a favorable partitioning scheme for a future web/email server?

The computer I'm installing Kubuntu on has a AMD Athlon processor (don't remember speed), 40G HD, 768M RAM (actually, it's already installed, so I could 'play around' with it a bit to get a little familiar with (K)Ubuntu/Linux. Re-installing is not a problem.). I will not be dual-booting, I have another computer with WinXP-Pro on it. In fact this computer used to have Win2k Server on it, but no longer .

I have already dabled with manually partitioning the HD, but didn't quite understand some of which I came across. First off was the choice of format, ms-dos(?) being one of them and the one I chose at the time. What would be the best choice, considering Kubuntu will be the only OS on it?

Next question is the scheme itself... I'm not sure of what sizes I should make each partition. Currently, I have:

Partition

Size

Mount

Type

hda1

1 GB

/boot

ext3

hda2

2X RAM

(swap)

(swap)

hda3

7 GB

/

reiserfs

hda5

9.3 GB

/home

reiserfs

hda6

9.3 GB

/usr

reiserfs

hda7

4.7 GB

/var

ext3

hda8

4.7 GB

/usr/local

reiserfs

I came up with this scheme just from various things I've read here, at the Ubuntu forums, guides, as well as other Linux oriented forums/guides. The sizes I just guessed at . The types were somewhat of a guess and chosen from what I've read, not really sure if it was the optimal way to go. Any recommendations are quite welcome .

Thanks in advance for any help/advice .

[mchuskie]

Re: Manual Partitioning

Why not just go with the default partitioning?

I have to confess, I'm a dual-booter, so that changes things a bit for me. The main mount point I have is / (and no seperate mounts for /usr or /var). I recently shrunk my Windows partition and created a new Reiser one now mounted as /resources.

If you want to do it manually...

• I wouldn't think that /boot needed more than 50MB (mine currently is 15MB!)
• /var takes up even less - mine currently sits at 12KB
• It's probably easiest to have a single partition mounted at / rather than lots of smaller partitions. Well, that's my personal preference anyway.

So my current partitioning is:

• hda1 - 2.4GB - a system partition that was installed when I first got the computer (something to do with Windows, I think)
• hda2 - 39.2GB - NTFS - /windows
• hda4 - 19.7GB - ReiserFS - /resources
• hda5 - 500MB - Swap
• hda6 - 14.5GB - ReiserFS - /

[Cr@ter$]

Re: Manual Partitioning

Thanks for you're thoughts .

I didn't want to keep everything (except swap) on a single partition for security & back-up reasons, and I've read many recommendations to seperate them for those very reasons, which made a lot of sense to me.

I tried having the /boot partition smaller, started out with 32 MB, but had some errors when installing. But the errors were probably caused by something else I did or didn't do, I realized after redoing it to what I posted above that I didn't make it bootable :-X .