I'm planning to repartition my 40GB hard drive with a seperate partition for /home. What would be a reasonable size for that partition?

Depends on what you want to do. I'm not sure why you even want to make it a separate partition. I just put it in my main "/" partition. The only time I make a separate partition is for "/var". I do that because I don't want logfiles to grow so big that they could fill up my entire root partition. That could only happen if someone's hacking my system or something. So it's a bit of protection against that. But I don't see any need to put "/home" on a separate partition. My advice is to not use a different partition.

So here's what I would do with 40GB:

Partition 1: "/" ... 38.5GB (boot partition, by the way)
Partition 2: swap ... 1 GB
Partition 3: "/var" 500 MB

I doubt you'd even need 500MB for "/var", but what the heck. And having a gig of swap is overkill, but I figured it could come in handy. I usually make swap equal to twice the total memory you have. So if I have 512MB of memory, I'd use 1GB of swap.

Steve

It really depends on the kind of files you will be keeping. If you download a lot of mp3s you might want to make it bigger than if you just used your computer for surfing and email. Also, are you only putting one operating system on this drive or a few? If you are only installing one distro, some swap and home, then I would make 28 gig for /, 2 gig for swap and 10 for home. Of course 10 gig might be a little excessive. If you have linux on right now see how much space you are using in your home parition and think how much more you will need. A reasonable /home for me would be 3-5 gig, so that way I never run out of space of course if I kept it clean and deleted things when I was done it would be less.

I'm not using it for a server or anything, the most used partition will be /home. I don't plan to use many graphics-intensive games, wouldn't about 10GB for the / partition be enough?

10 GB is more than enough space for / if you're using a seperate /home partition. /var and /usr are the only parts of the system that will grow much, and at last count a full blown Red Hat9 install (big heavy distro) was just a tad over 4 gigs. That leaves you 5 gigs worth of growth and a huge gig of space for the logs in /var.

IMO there's no such thing as an excessively large /home...it's too easy to fill up a harddrive with downloads, multimedia, etc. Ideally I'd like to have an 80GB or larger drive dedicated to /home...as it is, it's 3GB and getting filled quickly.

Also, having a separate partition allows you more freedom. You can change or reinstall your distro without having to backup all your files. If /home is on a separate physical drive you can put it into another linux machine and boot that one up with all your files and settings.

Why would you need a GB for swap. I have desktop machines that only have 128 megs of RAM that have 100 megs for swap that is never used.

If you have more than 128 megs of RAM, there really isn't a need to have more than 200 megs for swap.

Also, your /home partition can be any size, just think how much you think you will need as a user, downloading apps, media, etc.

I would suggest for a desktop machine maybe this scheme:

swap = 200 megs
/ = 1 GB
/usr = 3 to 5 GB
/var = 500 to 1GB
/tmp = 500 to 1 GB
/home = rest of drive

Its nice to have /var and /tmp on their own partitions. /var holds log files, if something chaotic happens and wants to write like mad log files to fill up your drive, it won't exceed the limited amount on that partition, thus not harming or filling up your / directory/partition. Same goes for /tmp in a similiar kind of way.
/usr you will want fairly larger, this is where most installed apps will reside, etc.
/ you can actually probably get away with a 300 to 500 mb partition, but its safe with a 40 GB drive to allocate a GB to it, just in case you need the extra space.

Cheers.

Yupyup.....same here. All my amputee vampire midget pr0n needs room to breathe

Careful about doing this. It's a great idea to divide some of the subdirectories in /usr , but if you use a partition for the root dir of /usr you may end up with an unbootable system, depending on where ext3, reiserfs, jfs and xfs utilities reside. I.E. the system looks for the reiserfs tools before it mounts the fstab and /usr/bin is where the binaries are, ala Slackware.

With the amount of tools and packages already installed, usually my /usr will be anywhere between 1 GB and 2 GB.. I'll actually make mine about 6 GB in which I have yet to ever fill up, since just about everything I have and use is already installed..

But yeah, treat this like your / partition, never try to fill it up to 100% capacity.

Cheers.

The reason *I* would use 1GB of swap is because I sometimes use my machine as a work machine. I work in the microchip design industry, so sometimes I write programs which work with vast amounts of data. It helps sometimes having a gig of swap for that.

But you're right, most people don't need anywhere near that much swap. But I would still tell them to put on a gig of swap just in case they have some remote possibility of needing it in the future for some weird application. Who knows. Disk space is cheap. Couldn't hurt anyway.

Steve