Partioning free space for manual install

Question

I have 53 gigabytes that need formating into /root, /swap, /usr/, /var, /home, and /tmp. If there's any help what is the best space allocation? Please let me know.

Answer 1

For my 40GB SSD drive, I partition the swap partition to be the same as my memory (i.e., I have 2GB of RAM, so is the swap partition.) I reserve about 10GB for /root, and the rest goes to /home. For your case, I think:

• Swap partition as said
• 14GB for /
• The rest for /home

I personally think partitioning for /usr, /var, and /tmp is too much trouble.

Answer 2

Consider using a more modern filesystem like btrfs which, with its subvolume feature, eliminates the need to do this sort of planning at all.

Answer 3

Assuming this is for desktop use, I would do something like this:

• /boot- 300MB
• /- 20gb (readonly if I want a faster boot, but it's usually annoying)
• swap- 2gb
• /home- rest of the drive

I like to keep a separate /boot, but you don't have to.

For a server setup, I would do something like this:

• /- 20gb (mounted read only)
• /root- 5gb
• swap- 2gb
• /srv- 5gb (read only, extended partition)
• /home- the rest (extended partition)
• /var- 5gb (extended partition)

I store all of my server stuff (web pages, etc) in /srv and leave /home for the bigger stuff. I keep /srv separate so I can reinstall / without losing my webserver data.

I would also mount /tmp as a tmpfs.

It really depends on the use case for the machine.