RADIFIED
Partitioning Strategies

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Partitioning for Linux

This page added to the guide on 15.August.2006.

The following insights come from Magoo, who has completely abandoned Windows, and now relies solely on Linux for all his computing needs. See here for more:> Magoo completes migration to Linux from Windows: Final Report. His comments regarding partitioning for Linux are here:

Swap size depends on how much memory you have and what you will be using the computer for. On my desktop, I have 768 or RAM and a 1 GB  swap and it is MORE then enough. In fact, I hardly ever use any swap space.

If you are putting everything else on one partition, I wouldn't make it much less than 5GB. You can make it as big as you want, of course.  

Personally, I prefer to break my file system into a few different partitions. It makes backup/recovery and upgrading much easier.  

Something like 5GB for root (/), 1GB for home (/home), and 500MB for TMP.  Most people also make /var separate. 1GB is more than enough for that.

ReiserFS is the best, or even Riser4, if your distro has it available. If you are worried about allowing things like Ghost to read  your partitions, you need to stick with ext3.

If you want Windows to be able to read the partition, Fat32 is your only choice.  If you want to encrypt your data (for security on something like a laptop that might get misplaced) then use ext2.

/var holds most of the logs and some of the configuration data for programs that run inside of secure zones (called "jails" or chroots.)

Because it holds the log files, it is nice to have a separate partition so that the root file system doesn't fill with logs.  This also helps keep your jailed applications where they belong.

For more along these lines, here's a Google search, pre-configured for the query: linux partitions for hard disk drives

Again, I'd like to thank Mr. Magoo for sharing his insights. He is author of a few other guides you might find helpful, such as his:

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