Disc partitioning

I want to install openSUSE 11.1 in my computer machine whose configuration is as follows:

  1. HDD 500 GB, of that 100 GB is for Windows OS and rest for linux
  2. RAM 1x2GB DDR2-800
  3. Intel core2Duo E8500 (3.16 GHz)

Could some please suggest me how many different types of partitions (eg /, /boot, /var etc) are needed for openSUSE and what should their size in above mentioned PC.

Can partition be the same as in Fedora 10 12.2. General Information on Partitions

/, swap, and /home.
The install disk will do it all for you including choosing sizes. You can override them if you want.

Not sure if you have the DVD or CD but here are the install walk throughs for them both:

Installation/11.1 DVD Install - openSUSE
Installation/11.1 Live CD - openSUSE

PLUS this forums new user guide…

NEWBIES - Suse-11.1 Pre-installation – PLEASE READ - openSUSE Forums

Hop that helps.

Cheers
Steve

It’s more or less a matter of philosophy and/or depends what you intend to do with that machine. The output below is taken from a “medium” desktop machine which has Gnome, Kde4, Xfce, several other wms, Koffice and openOffice, Eclipse, Lamp server (Apache, Mysql, PHP), PostGresql, VirtualBox and a lot of stuff …

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 4.1G 1.3G 2.7G 32% /
/dev/sda7 16G 6.5G 8.5G 44% /usr
/dev/sda8 6.0G 283M 5.8G 5% /var
/dev/sda9 7.9G 205M 7.3G 3% /local
/dev/sda10 124G 35G 89G 29% /srv
/dev/sda11 4.0G 137M 3.7G 4% /tmp
/dev/sdb10 35G 368M 32G 2% /home

In that example /home is on another disk, but that’s irrelevant. Usually, you would allocate all the space left to /home.

/srv is usefull for servers only.
/var should not be to small (it often is)
/local is intended for stuff you will compile yourself. If you’re not going to, you don’t need it. If you do, you should synlink it to /usr/local

ln -s /local /usr/local

Some distros put certain packages in /opt.
If you don’t have a /opt partition, it will fill your root partition. The trick is to create a /usr/opt directory and symlink to it.

ln -s /usr/opt /opt

take 4 GB for swap.

Yes.

Not to mention that you can also use LVM and not care about the size of your partitions (they will be automatically resized if needed). However I wouldn’t put / and swap on LVM (some people do). You can not have more than 16 partitions.