Re: [gentoo-user] Suggestions on partitioning HD

[Dave Nebinger]

1. Boot should be at most ext3, but ext2 is just fine (the only thing on this 
partition is kernel images and grub stages).  Keeping to this will mean less 
problems at boot time (grub users can tell you nightmares about 
reiserfs /boot partitions, and I'd guess that jfs would be in the same 
category).  50 meg is a nice round number although you can do with half that 
(I personally use 100mb but I've got a number of kernels installed there).

2. /opt does not need to be a separate partition.  Few gentoo things go there, 
so it is not worth maintaining a separate partition for (and wasting the 
possible space).

3. /home should be a separate partition, sized to your needs.

4.  I'm from the old school where we believe /var/tmp and /tmp should be 
separate partitions.  This is primarily before they were made partitions as a 
norm and were on the root partition; filling them meant filling / and also 
meant you would lose access to your box.

5. For gentoo I recommend using a separate partition for /usr/portage.  It's 
hard to nail down a size for this as portage tree keeps growing and the 
number of distfiles you might have is in flux.  Isolating it ensures that any 
growth issues are isolated to that branch.

6. /var is your choice whether to parrtition separately or not, but is 
probably a good idea.  /var/logs will grow over time, /var/spool is in 
constant flux, but the rest will typically remain kinda static (note this 
depends upon the apps you use; mysql houses it's databases under /var by 
default, and apache/tomcat use /var/www so that can chane also.

Sizing each of the areas is really personal preference; if you ask 10 
different gentooers you'll probably get 11 different responses at least.

Dave
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