Having played around for about a year with almost every distro out there, i decided on suse. I have a 250gb hard drive, 3GB of RAM (so use 3GB of Swap).
I normally use partitions as follows:
/ = 20GB
Swap = 3GB
/home = 227GB
I was thinking however, that the setup might not be that good.
Eg, is the / partition too big?
And should i split /home, to have a partition for /home for settings etc, but a partition alos for all my music and videos, so that if i change distros or reinstall, i can overwrite the / and /home partitions without having to transfer off the music etc. Is this a good idea?
EG: /home 50gb and /Files = rest of disk. What size would /home need to be if no files would be one it?
npinn001 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Having played around for about a year with almost every distro out
> there, i decided on suse. I have a 250gb hard drive, 3GB of RAM (so use
> 3GB of Swap).
>
> I normally use partitions as follows:
> / = 20GB
> Swap = 3GB
> /home = 227GB
>
> I was thinking however, that the setup might not be that good.
>
> Eg, is the / partition too big?
> And should i split /home, to have a partition for /home for settings
> etc, but a partition alos for all my music and videos, so that if i
> change distros or reinstall, i can overwrite the / and /home partitions
> without having to transfer off the music etc. Is this a good idea?
>
> EG: /home 50gb and /Files = rest of disk. What size would /home need to
> be if no files would be one it?
>
> What would an optimal setup look like?
That would be hard to say without knowing how you use the computer,
and what you keep on disk.
I have a 20 GB partition for / and found it to be 97% full the other
day, so I would say that yours is not too big. Of course, it had a lot
of different kernels in /boot and /lib/modules.
If you want to try other distros, you might set aside a spare
partition of 30 GB, or so for that purpose. If /home has no files on
it, it could be quite small, but there are always files in
/home/<user>. If you want to have a Files partition mounted as
/home/Files, then /home/<user> would only have the configuration stuff
on it. How much E-mail do you keep? If it is minimal, then 20-30 GB
should be sufficient. My /home partition is 92 GB and is 78% full, but
it has all my files. I have several full kernel-source trees in it.
Just my 2 cents.
I dont think having a seperate Home partition on the same drive offers any benifit. If you have 2 drives in your machine, use the smaller or faster one for /, and the larger or slower one for /home. But if your only using 1 drive, I would have a Swap partion, and a /.
If I would have built a 3GB /, I wouldnt have half the programs installed that I do. In my opinion computer usage has alot to do with how you setup your hard drive. And since you cant easily expand partions once there setup, your stuck with what you got when you really need more.
On my kids computers, I break it down between 2 Hard Drives. On my personal, Its 1 large Hard Drive for / and 1 4GB solid state for swap. Again, this is my personal preference based on how I use my machines and continually upgrade OS versions on my kids with out having to loose the /home data.
Good Luck with your usage on OpenSuSE.
Hope your experiance is a possitive one.
I stopped using swap partitions ages ago, it’s just a waste of space!
With 2gigs of RAM+ I really think it’s unnecessary. I haven’t had any problems so far, and on install it informs you that it’s OK not to have a swap partition, so I guess it’s OK.
And having multiple kernels along with the source can get very big very fast. I had over 3 gig just wasted by kernel source in my last install.
You can always simply relocate anything like that with a symlink though, so no biggie
Johnfm3 wrote:
> Just my 2 cents.
> I dont think having a seperate Home partition on the same drive offers
> any benifit. If you have 2 drives in your machine, use the smaller or
> faster one for /, and the larger or slower one for /home. But if your
> only using 1 drive, I would have a Swap partion, and a /.
The benefit of a /home partition is that you can preserve it across
installations. At the moment, I can boot either 11.1 or 11.2 RC1 using
the same /home - all my user files are available from either.
lwfinger
I understand your point, as I have done the same in the past. But as I have in the past accidently deleted or over writen a home partion in the past. I find it more reliable to copy the data from home, to my file server. Build box and move files back. Hopefully, OpenSuSE and Samba will figure out CSYNC and allow users to have roaming linux profiles that copy between client and file server during logon/logoff.
In your case, I would have a seperate HD for /home. That way I know to only install to sda and leave sdb alone.
it’s not a waste of space if you’re hibernating. Hibernation is very useful for desktops too, not just laptops. I always suspend to disk rather than RAM when I’m away for a while, saves power…
