On 20100304_135430, postid wrote: > I'm setting up a laptop for triple boot: WinXP; Debian Lenny with KDE > and lots of bells and whistles; Debian Lenny with Fluxbox and just the > essentials. I may swap one of those three for a different distro later. > Here's the planned layout: > > hda1 -------- WinXP > hda2 -------- / for first distro > hda3 -------- / for second distro > hda4 -------- extended > hda5 -------- /home for first distro > hda6 -------- /home for second distro > hda7 -------- shared data partition > hda8 -------- swap > > All data will be stored in the shared data partition, except for what's > in the dot files (e-mail, etc.) in the /home partitions. (I'm not using > a shared /home partition since I want to avoid config conflicts.) I have > limited hard-drive space. > > Here are the questions: > > -- How small can I make the /home partitions? > > -- With data being stored in its own partition, what are the limiting > factors for /home partition size? I suspect it's e-mail attachments > that could bloat /home the quickest. > > On the other hand, I could just let /home be a part of / for each > distro (as below) and back up the dot files regularly. > > hda1 -------- WinXP > hda2 -------- / for first distro > hda3 -------- / for second distro > hda4 -------- extended > hda5 -------- shared data partition > hda6 -------- swap >
For squeeze, a fresh install of a desktop system with Xwindows, Gnome, Iceweasel, etc. puts less than 1,000,000 bytes of config files into /home. The iceweasel stuff grows over time because you will probably want to save some bookmarks. I recommend that you use your second method and just merge this stuff into the root partitions for each of the two distros. But there can be problems, e.g.: Photo library software typically puts a large cache of thumbnails into a dot-hidden file in /home. If you save photos it is generally easy to make the software save the pictures in a special location (i.e. your shared partition) but the undocumented dot-files generally go some place that is not under your control. HTH -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100304213529.gd7...@big.lan.gnu
