What sizes should you allocate to the /, /boot, /home and swap [closed]
I have just got the new installation of Ubuntu 9.10.
I am doing a clean install. I have already windows XP on a separate partition.
I went to the advanced options for partitions the file system.
However, I need to allocate space for the root, boot, swap and home directories.
I am just wondering what is the idea size I should do for each, this is just my idea, please correct if I am wrong.
The root '/' - Is that where all the linux installation files gets installed to?
The /boot - Should be mounted on a primary partition so that the BIOS can find it?
The /swap - Should be 2x RAM mounted on special swap file system?
The /home - Is this where I do all my work .i.e. documents, videos, pictures, etc?
My computer spec is: 2GB Ram 320 GB Hard disk
Solution 1:
Create swap at the beginning of your drive, 2x your physical RAM is a good guideline. Boot can be pretty small if you want to make it a separate partition, a gig or less. You want make your root partition big enough that you have space to install more applications later but not so big that you feel cramped in your home partition.
Here's what I would do if I was building your system:
- 4GB swap
- <1GB boot
- 30GB /
- the rest /home
Solution 2:
/boot does not need a lot of space (say 1 Go).
/swap used to be twice the RAM on old configurations, now with more than 2 Go of ram, you won't need more than 2 Go of swap.
/ is important and difficult to scale : will you install a lot of stuff ? Will you use other directories than /home to save things (web server/ftp files for example) ? If you don't, 10 Go would be very good for a ubuntu.
/home need to be as big as possible for you to enjoy your linux distro
Solution 3:
I'm sure that there are many interesting reasons for having separate partitions, but I've found it easiest (and more flexible) to just create / and nothing else. A swap partition might be OK if your machine is low on RAM (2GB is on the edge) and/or you anticipate heavily using the machine. I've found that 1.5x RAM size is a good swap size.
Solution 4:
A clean installation of Ubuntu 9.10 requires an odd 2.5 GB on disk. Is up to you to decide how much space you need for extra programs and data.
IMHO you don't need to have /boot and /home as separate partitions.
Unless you exactly know what you're doing and have some real reason to do that, splitting your filesystems into multiple places does not make much more sense than a all-in-one-place approach for the typical home use.
You can easily install GRUB on the MBR to have a dual-boot machine and you can create a single partition (mounted as /) for both system files and users home directories.
Speaking of the /swap partition:2GB of installed RAM make very unlikely that you ever need a swap space, except when you will put your PC in suspend / sleep mode. In this scenario the RAM image (part of it?) will be dumped on disk, so you can live happy with a swap partition = RAM size.