Re: [PLUG] Linux n00b question

[Art Alexion <art.alexion@gmail.com>]

On Jan 5, 2011, at 6:02 PM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:

>> Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 10:06:13 -0500
>> From: jeff<jeffv@op.net>
>> 
>> On 01/05/2011 08:56 AM, Steve Slaughter wrote:
>>> What, in your opinion, is the best way to partition this drive?
>> 
>> I use a small swap partition, / partition, and a very large /home.
> 
> 
> 
> For #2, if you are running Debian, Ubuntu or Gentoo, you don't do "clean" reinstalls anyway, you do upgrades or emerges.  So unless you like to mess around with your system (and that's what virtualization is for), you won't reinstall much or at all.  If you are running an RPM-based distro, this is more important.  In that case, a separate /home/ makes more sense.
> 
> 
> The main danger to breaking things up into little partitions is that if you guess wrong on space, you can fill up, say /var/ and still have lots of space left in / or /home/.  Filling up /var/ in that case won't crash the system, but it's still annoying.

> 
> 
> Finally, after saying all of that, I personally almost never bother with anything other than a small swap partition and everything else in /.  I monitor my systems so they don't run out of space, and I run Debian or Ubuntu on RAID1 (see recent RAID threads) so I don't do clean installs even when swapping hard drives or machines.
> 
> 
> Other old-timers please chime in if I messed up any details.  ;-)
> 

Ubuntu system upgrades tend to get sloppy over time. Then you will want to do a clean install. Having a home partition can be handy in that case. Been using Ubuntu since Warty (3.10?), and some upgrades have just been more problematic than others. 

On a small drive netbook, I have occasionally had /var/cache/apt/archive fill up, but never /var/log. Fixing the former is as easy as running "sudo aptitude autoclean" from a terminal once in a while. 

-- 
Art Alexion
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