Hi ALL,

I am Linux Newbie.

I want to know the details of what are the required partitions for
starting LInux installation, basically i go for / , /boot and swap.So
all the /bin /sbin are automatically created by installation
itself,this way i understand it would be difficult to recover if the
system crashes and we lose all the data.

I want create individual partitions at the time of installation itself,
but do not have the idea of what are the min and max size for each
partition.

Hope you got my question ?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Kanthi Kiran.

Kanthi <TechAlerts@gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to know the details of what are the required partitions for
> starting LInux installation, basically i go for / , /boot and swap.So

REQUIRED is only / (unless you're using umsdos or likewise, then you
can even use the "windows" partition for that).
All others is essentially a question of preference
(and ask 10 slackers, get at least 11 different answers).

On machines with not too much RAM, swap is recommended, but on
"big machines" even that isn't really needed.
--
************************************************** ******************
** Eef Hartman, Delft University of Technology, dept. EWI/TW **
** e-mail: E.J.M.Hartman@math.tudelft.nl, fax: +31-15-278 7295 **
** snail-mail: P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands **
************************************************** ******************

Thank You Eef Hartman ,

What i want to know is if I want to make all the partitions before
starting installation ,how should i proceed

eg:
/
/bin
/sbin
/root
/usr
/opt........etc .......in this case what should be the sizes of each
partition and how should i consider them ?

Regards,
Kanthi

"Kanthi" (TechAlerts@gmail.com) writes:
> Hi ALL,
>
> I am Linux Newbie.
>
> I want to know the details of what are the required partitions for
> starting LInux installation, basically i go for / , /boot and swap.So
> all the /bin /sbin are automatically created by installation
> itself,this way i understand it would be difficult to recover if the
> system crashes and we lose all the data.
>
Those multiple partitions are often because it's a server application,
which is can have different requirements from desktop use.

The key thing a newcomer needs is a separate /home partition. That
way, if they want to change distributions or play around with anything,
they easily keep their own stuff. When I first installed, I used only
one partition (ie it was the whole drive), and when I wanted to try
other things it had become too complicated (not having a CD writer
at the time) because /home was not isolated.

When I got a new computer, with a 20gig drive, I set up about a 5gig
partition for / and then a relatively small partition for /home But
then I left the rest unused, for later flexibility. I made
a 5gig partition, and mount that when I need extra space, for things like
copying my records to CDROM.

You can always mount unused partitions long after the installation, and
partition unused disk space, but once you dedicate all of the hard drive
to something, you've lost flexibility. Whether there's a need for
multiple partitions in your case, you won't really know useage until
you use it, at which point you may find that you allocated too much
space for one directory, and not enough for the rest.

Michael

> I want to know the details of what are the required partitions for
> starting LInux installation, basically i go for / , /boot and swap.So

/boot isn't strictly needed anymore.

> I want create individual partitions at the time of installation itself,
> but do not have the idea of what are the min and max size for each
> partition.

For a "normal" workstation there's no need for special partitioning:
just go for swap, from 6 to 10 Gigs for /, and all the space left
for /home.

--
Powered by Slackware Linux 10.1
Ultime parole famose: C'e' tanta gente, chi vuoi che se ne accorga se
me lo metto in tasca?

"Kanthi" <TechAlerts@gmail.com> wrote:
> What i want to know is if I want to make all the partitions before
> starting installation ,how should i proceed
>
> eg:
> /
> /bin
> /sbin
> /root
> /usr
> /opt........etc .......in this case what should be the sizes of each
> partition and how should i consider them ?

Some directoreis has to be on the / partition. These directories are:

/bin
/dev
/etc
/lib
/sbin

Reasons to place directories on separate partitions might be:

1) You might want to share this partition with another OS installation. So
the same /home and /usr/local could be used by both Slackware 10.0 and
10.1.

2) To avoid corruption of the / partition you might want to place
directories with a lot of writings like /tmp and /var on their own
partitions. Today with journaling file systems this is not as important as
it once used to be.

3) To keep the root partition small you might want to place big
directories like /usr, /var and /opt on their own partitions. Once again,
this used to be more important before the journaling file systems.

4) If some user or application fills up the disc you might want to protect
other directories from being filled by placing them on different
partitions.

The sizes of your partitions will be a compromise between how big disk you
have and how much software you are going to install.

regards Henrik
--
The address in the header is only to prevent spam. My real address is:
hc2(at)uthyres.com Examples of addresses which go to spammers:
info@k-software.biz svar@webtelevision.se info@webrider.ru root@localhost

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:08:19 -0800, Kanthi wrote:

> Hi ALL,
>
> I am Linux Newbie.
>
> I want to know the details of what are the required partitions for
> starting LInux installation, basically i go for / , /boot and swap.So
> all the /bin /sbin are automatically created by installation
> itself,this way i understand it would be difficult to recover if the
> system crashes and we lose all the data.
>
> I want create individual partitions at the time of installation itself,
> but do not have the idea of what are the min and max size for each
> partition.
>
> Hope you got my question ?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Regards,
> Kanthi Kiran.

/ (that is root) is the only required partition. A swap partition is a
good idea. Beyond that - however you want to st it up. It is probably a
good idea to put /home on it's own partition.

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:28:58 -0800, Kanthi wrote:

> Thank You Eef Hartman ,
>
> What i want to know is if I want to make all the partitions before
> starting installation ,how should i proceed
>
> eg:
> /
> /bin
> /sbin
> /root
> /usr
> /opt........etc .......in this case what should be the sizes of each
> partition and how should i consider them ?
>
> Regards,
> Kanthi

You need /. /home is a good idea - beyond that, for each additional
partition you are wasting space (which, of course, is no problem if you
have a big hard disk) - but there is no particular advantage to carving it
up anyway.

On 2005-02-21, Kanthi <TechAlerts@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> /
> /bin
> /sbin
> /root
> /usr
> /opt

Eef already stated this, but it's important enough to restate: /bin and
/sbin (and /etc, and /lib) *must* be on the same partition as /. The
reason is that, in single-user mode, there's no guarantee that all
filesystems will be available, so the kernel must be able to mount / and
be able to run any binaries init needs (including init) from /. (If you
need fsck, for example, it better be on /.)

--keith

--
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see X- headers for PGP signature information

ray wrote:

> ... there is no particular advantage to carving it up anyway.

That's not entirely true, but whether or not there is an advantage is
very dependant on the individual installation. consider the following
partitioning scheme, which I use on both home and work systems:

/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 on /usr type ext3 (ro)
/dev/sda5 on /var type ext3 (rw,nosuid)
/dev/sda6 on /tmp type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda7 on /local type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda8 on /public type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda9 on /home type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev)

"/public" on some systems (particularly workstations) might be "/opt"
instead; that varies. "/local" is what most Linux distributions call
"/usr/local" (on some systems, I have a symlink from /usr/local to
/local, but again that varies by need). Some systems have more than one
physical disk providing the above partitions.

I could arguably (and perhaps should) have "nodev" on /var and/or
"noexec" on /var and /tmp. On some systems that would cause some
difficulty (users might use /tmp to test software before installing on
their home directories), while on others it would certainly seem
appropriate.

Notice that I'm not showing any sizes. As someone has already said,
that's a tradeoff between size of disk and software installed. I have a
default minimal size that I expect to be able to make each partition,
and I try and leave as much space as possible for /local, /home,
/public, and on some systems (particularly mail servers), /var.

I would argue that there are some very good reasons for keeping locally
installed software, home directories, and directories made public (for
example by a web server, ftp server, etc.) on separate partitions than
the OS directories.

There are also good reasons to not have contents of /usr writable except
when you specifically want to make changes, and the benefits of having
/var and /tmp on separate partitions become immediately obvious as soon
as one or the other fills and either causes logs to be lost, mail to be
dropped (/tmp fills, preventing further writes to /var if not separate),
passwords to not be changeable or other system administration work to
be interrupted (either /tmp or /var fill, but on the same disk partition
as /).

These are, of course, only some examples, and may not be a concern in
every situation, but hopefully illustrate that there can be an
"advantage to carving it up" ...

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------