On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 21:04 -0700, Paul J. wrote: > I'm putting a extra hard drive on my XP box which will be home to > Ubuntu. I've been doing dual-boots since the mid-'90s, but haven't > done a new Linux install for a few years. I would like to partition > the Ubuntu drive to facilitate future distro upgrades, if the > partition scheme makes any difference in that area. I remember > something about having a dedicated /home partition to make upgrades easier. > > I'm a Linux hobbyist and enthusiast, so I'm asking about a partition > scheme for a "home" user. >
The Arch Linux Beginner's Guide has a very nice, short but informative guide to the rationales behind putting various directories on separate partitions: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide#Partition_Hard_Drives One or two things mentioned are specific to Arch Linux, but mostly it is general enough that you can get a good idea about whether you need to mess with Ubuntu's default partitioning scheme or just accept it as is. I mention it not because I think you should follow the guide's example, only because it gives a quick overview of why some people want certain directories on their own partitions and what they gain from it. You can decide whether these things are important to you. Personally, as another "home" user, I just use separate /, swap, and /home partitions. I do keep a lot of my own data on a different partition (called, are you ready? -- "data"!) so I can access it easily from any OS I've installed without having to mount the /home/[user] partition from another distro. I'm usually dual-booting something or other because I like to try out distros from time to time. One thing the guide doesn't go into is a separate /usr/local. If you think you might be compiling a lot of apps or otherwise installing things from outside Ubuntu's repositories, having a separate /usr/local could be useful, at the very least for ease-of-backup and possibly for ease-of-distro-upgrades. OTOH, /usr/local on my Debian installation is currently populated by entirely empty directories, so for me it would be a waste of time. But I have seen various Debian users more advanced than me recommend putting /usr/local on its own partition, or at least consider the possible advantages. Michael M. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
