[lug] Partition sizes

[Lee Woodworth]

Elyse M. Grasso wrote:
> Since it looks like I will be migrating to a new distro, I should probably 
>  think about resizing my partitions while I'm at it. I was in a hurry to get 
> the laptop up last spring and took SuSE's default, which turned out to be one 
> big partition. But if I may be thrashing distros for a while I want to 
> pull /home into its own partition.
> 
> On a 100 gig hard drive where I plan to run some vmware virtual machines and 
> try different software packages, is a 60/40 split of home/other reasonable? 
> 
> Do people generally put vmware guests in /home or in system space? 
> 
Have you thought about LVM?  With some file systems (e.g. xfs) and LVM
you can grow the partition & fs with fs mounted.  Came in handy once while
I was compiling Open Office and  needed to bump the /tmp partition 8 hours
into the build.

As far as partitions this is what I use:

100M sda1         /boot
500m sda2         /
the rest of the disk for LVM:
  10G  /dev/vg/usr  /usr
  1G   /dev/vg/tmp  /tmp
  5G   /dev/vg/home /home

/opt is a soft link to a dir in /usr or /home

If you keep /root, /bin, /sbin, /lib, /etc on the root fs, then
you don't need an initrd to boot.

If you have to multi boot M$ cruft (I do unfortunately) then a 10G
partition is needed for it.

It can be handy to have a 9.5G+ lvm volume around if you are building
iso files for dvds.