On Tue, Apr 17, 2001, will trillich wrote: > On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 05:57:44PM +0200, Allan Andersen wrote: > > If it's for personal use I would use something like similar to this: > > > > /boot - 16 MB bootable > > swap - 2 x amount of RAM in the PC > > / - the rest > > that's a great first-install concept. > > how big your partitions are will depend ENTIRELY on what you use > your computer for. graphics leans this way, web server leans that > way, and gamer's paradise is completely different altogether. > there's no set defined best way for all instances. you gotta > figure it out for yourself. > > after you munge and install and remove and configure and add and > download and tweak -- for a month -- you'll finally have things > running the way you like. > > THEN you do a > > du /usr/local > du /var > du /home > du /etc <-- just kidding > du /usr <-- subtract /usr/local, of course > > to find out how much you've used. > > i'd rank each as a PERCENTAGE of the entire disk space, unless > you feel like keeping a large partition at the end in case of > "i'd sure like to break off this subtree" emergency... > > then do > > dpkg --get-selections '*' > ~/installed.packages > > and back up /home and /usr/local, reformat, repartition to > reflect your usage percentages: > > /boot = 10mb or less? > / = % from 'du' above > /home = % from 'du' above > swap = 2 * ram > /var = % from 'du' above > /usr/local = % from 'du' above > /usr = % from 'du' above > > the partitions that are busiest should be in the middle, IMHO. > > now you can restore /usr/local and /home, then reinstall your set > packages with > > dpkg --set-selections < ~/installed.packages
Hi, I think Will makes a good suggestion for this "empirically"-tuned hard-drive partitioning scheme. The only thing I might add is that the above outlined approach will lose any customization you might have made to config files in /etc (of course dotfiles in your home directories have been backed up). Therefore, I would probably add a backup of the /etc directory to archive these customizations. Debian's smart enough not to mess with config files via 'apt-get upgrade', but, as great as it is, it still can't manage to preserve them through a hard-drive wipe :) Hope this adds something and take care, Daniel -- Daniel A. Freedman Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics Department of Physics Cornell University
