partitioning hd

[Aaron Howell]

jason, you do need at the very least 2 partitions (unless you have a _lot_ of ram).
If you had, say, 256mb of ram, and you weren't going to be running X, compiling large programs, etc, then you might get by without swap.
If you don't, or you intend to use your system for real work, then a good guide for swap is twice the physical ram of your system.
That used to be mandatory, now its just a good guide.
So if you have 128mb of physical ram you might consider a 256mb swap partition.
You have two options with the rest of your drive,
you can either just have 1 big root partition and be done with it.
(this is ok for a personal system but if you're going to have multiple users or if you're going to be running servers there are various reasons why you don't want to do it that way),
or you can have multiple partitions, in which case you should have
/ (the root partition), /usr, /var and /home.
You can break it up more than that if you like, e.g /usr/local, /var/log, /var/spool,
but the others are a minimum. (strictly you don't need to have /home but if you leave it on /, you'll soon wish you hadn't.)
Really the best partitioning scheme depends on what you are using your system for.
If you do a workstation install of RedHat (or a personal desktop install for those using the 7.4 beta), the automatic partition option will do a reasonable job of setting up partitions for you.
Beware though, don't choose autmatic partitioning for a server build, because it'll splat your windows partition for you (redhat assumes if you are installing a server you are dedicating the machine to Linux, and that it hence doesn't need to worry about existing partitions belonging to other operating systems).
I hope that helps a bit (or maybe it confuses a lot, I don't know).
Regards
Aaron
On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 04:18:20AM -0500, Jason Symes wrote:
> Hi all.
> I'm now ready to install redhat 7.3 on my pc, but I've got a couple
> partitioning questions. I've gotten my hands on a copy of partition magic
> to adjust my hd's partitions. I want to install linux separate from my
> windows partition, and I've already isolated windows in its own separate
> partition. Looking over some of the redhat docs, it seems I should make 2
> partitions for redhat, 1 for the root and 1 for the swap. Is this correct,
> and what would good sizes be for these partitions?
> Thanks a bunch.
> 
> Jason Symes
> If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any at all!
> There's no where to go but up!
> Just trying to plug away!
> The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the
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