GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

Suggested Partitioning

A very useful guide written by Karsten Self is available from http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/partition.html.

The simplest of partitioning scheme is to have three partitions, one for / (10GB perhaps), one for swap (2 times available RAM) and the rest as /home. This may well suffice and avoids users filling up the root partition and the system thus having problems, and also facilitates a reinstall of the operating system, without wiping out user data.

A significantly (and perhaps unnecessarily) more complex scheme, and one that is often recommended based on the Debian distribution and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is:

Path	Size	Rationale
swap	2xRAM	An old rule of thumb. Generally there's plenty of disk space to handle this.
/	50MB-100MB	This is where the base system lives and contains just enough to boot a system, and will allow you to boot into single user mode in case of catastrophe elsewhere on the disk. By being small it is less prone to corruption as a result of a system crash. On a typical server (maximum of PLYMZ and Velox (104.33)) it contains bin (2MB), lib (40MB), root (15MB), and sbin (2MB). The directory is usually static and unshareable.
/tmp	50MB-100MB	It is empty after reboot.
/boot	16MB	It is 6MB on PLYMZ, 2MB on Velox (104.33).
/usr	500MB-2GB	This directory is usually static and shareable. It is 1GB on PLYMZ, 2GB on Velox (104.33). This includes /usr/local.
/var	200MB-500MB	This directory is variable with some parts shareable and others not. Often used for email and news feeds. It is 1GB on PLYMZ, 2GB on Velox (104.33), and both are being used as web servers.
/etc		This directory is usually static and unshareable. It is 5MB on PLYMZ, 10MB on Velox (104.33).
/usr/local	200MB-2GB	This directory is usually shareable. Typically for local networks this is mounted from a server. It is 500MB on Velox (104.33) acting as a server.
/home	200MB	This directory is usually shareable. Typically for local networks this is mounted from a server. It is 4GB on Velox (104.33) acting as a server.
/ktnet	(remainder)	This is used for a networked environment where disk space on each machine is shared. Create a subdirectory on /ktnet with the name of this host with the intention of NFS mounting this on other hosts in the network. Mount other hosts' /ktnet areas here.