I want to install openSUSE 11.1 in my computer machine whose configuration is as follows:
HDD 500 GB, of that 100 GB is for Windows OS and rest for linux
RAM 1x2GB DDR2-800
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.
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 …
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.