Re: [gentoo-user] partition scheme

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 17 October 2006 08:54, Thufir wrote:
> For hdb, what's a good partitioning scheme?  I want to go with
> reiser, and keep the vfat (for win2k).  I have 512MB RAM, should I
> change the swap size?  Is there a big advantage to using LVM versus
> just a regular root partition?

Hi,

This is one of those questions that we can't really answer, as the 
correct answer is "it depends".

What do you want to do with this machine, what role does it have in 
life? If you ask me how would I partition a workstation, a busy mail 
server and a company file server, I'd give you three completely 
different answers....

I take it this is a workstation though (512M ram....). For those it 
think it's a good idea to keep /home on a separate partition so it can 
easily be shared between distros. If you have several users who all 
need to get at the same shared data (like an mp3 collection) then 
putting that on a separate partition is also convenient.

As for lvm - it is amazingly useful, and it's real use if often 
misunderstood: it lets you manipulate partitions and move them around. 
This is amazingly difficult without lvm and usually involves extra 
drives and moving many GB out of the way to make space. So lvm gives 
you no benefit in normal use, but the first time you need to shrink / 
to make a separate /home on a disk with no unpartitioned space, you'll 
thanks your lucky stars you used lvm :-)

That swap size (452M) is ok for normal use. If you find that the machine 
is using lots of that swap in daily use, then you'll have to increase 
it. And if you need suspend/resume, then you'll need to increase that 
partition to at least the size of your ram. Actually, make it 1G 
minimum - ram upgrades are easy, and there's a good chacne you'll do it 
anyway in the future.

alan

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