Quick Query About Default root Partition Size

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hey Guys n Gals,

I’ve finally found my ideal linux distro that i’m happy with in OpenSuse 11.3. I’m dual booting with Win Xp at the moment and have been google-ing and tinkering about with my distro and i’m learning new stuff everyday but I have a question about something that’s been bothering me. I think i’ve figured out that the / partition is similar to the C: Drive in windows which contains program files n stuff am i right? and the home partition which contains users and their files is an offshoot of the root? So if this is the case, i was in the expert partitioner in YAST to see how the the drive was partitioned and was wondering if the / partition was too big and if i could decrease the size and add it to the /home?. My sys specs are 512mb RAM Dell Dimension 3000 with an 80GB HDD 2.8Ghz Intel Celeron. I also have a 80Gb and 160Gb External laptop drives mainly for my movies n music n stuff. Also is the Swap partition a good size for the spec of computer i have?

Here’s the HDD Breakdown:

/dev/sda 74.51GB
/dev/sda1 29.52 GB NTFS /windows/c
/dev/sda2 44.99GB Extended
/dev/sda5 744.00MB Linux Swap Swap swap
/dev/sda6 17.76GB Linux Native Ext4 /
/dev/sda7 26.50GB Linux Native Ext4 /home

Cheers

Steven

2

You might be able to steal a few G from / and allocate it to /home, but honestly that won’t last you very long. You’d be better off keeping all the bulky stuff on another disk until it’s time to replace your laptop.

On my machine I allocated 24G to / to be generous, back in the days of 11.2 I think. Currently usage is around 12G but there are quite a few files in /tmp contributing to that. But disk space is cheap, at least for desktops. Next machine I’ll probably up / to 32G for greater future-proofing.

3

Cheers Ken

That sounds like a good explanation to me thanks. I’ll keep it as it is because as i said i’ve got the externals for the big stuff. What about the swap partition size? is 744mb enough? I generally just browse the net and play the games in the repo while listening to music so i don’t think the swap gets used that much what would you recommend?

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Your current partitioning looks perfect to me. It’ s almost the best one can do with such a hard disk size. You don’t have very much RAM, nor very much swap (I would have taken at least 1 GB), but if you can live with it, tha’ts fine.

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For most people the /tmp folder is not that important, so you can always set it up to be cleaned at boot
Clear Temp Files at Boot

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That’s great to know. Thanks for your replies guys. hopefully soon i’ll be able to a another GB or so of RAM but in the mean time the old gal is performing way better under suse than xp. i used to have mint with win 7 on my acer laptop before that gave up the ghost with acer’s crappy hardware lol. Again thanks for the advice and info.

Steven

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Type this command if you wonder how much swap space is used:

swapon -s

You should notice anyway, since hard disk is much slower than RAM.

  • You should definitely clear /tmp at boot.
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i tried that in the CL it said swapon command not found? i’m sure i seen a gui program somewhere on my comp, can’t remeber where i seen it though any ideas?

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su -
swapon -s

You need to switch to su -

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Thera are several. Most system monitoring tools can display RAM and swap usage, among other things.

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ah right :shame: yeah it worked thanks! i’m running Bygfoor Football manager and firefox and it says this: /dev/sda5 partition 761852 107992 -1

I take it thats ample space?

Thanks again for the replies.:slight_smile:

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P.S I would mark this thread as solved because of the quality help…but i can’t see an option lol :\

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Konqueror can display some basic information on RAM and swap used, by entering “sysinfo:/” in the address bar. It shows some other system information as well, like video driver used.