Partitioning advice (/usr and /home)

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> I'm trying to figure out a decent partitioning layout for a workstation. The
> system has an ~80GB disk. After /, /var, /tmp and swap, I have 70GB left.
> I'm wondering how to split these between /usr and /home. Ironically, it is
> more space than I seem to need. The box has only one user (me), I do not
> have a fast enough connection to download large amounts audio or video
> files. I plan to run the KDE3 desktop environment with most of its
> applications (this is still well under 1.5GB), assorted other software,
> Wine, two or three Windows apps if they'll run.
> 
> I'm torn between various options here, and would appreciate your input:
> 
> 35GB for each, /usr and /home
> 25GB for /home and 45GB for /home
> 70GB for both together (no /home partition)
> 
> Or something completely different? I'd like this to be "spacey" enough so
> that I won't run out of room at some point in the future, but 35GB for /usr
> seems unrealistically much (there won't be mail on this system, it's fed by
> an IMAP server on a different machine). Then again, 35GB for /home seems
> just as unrealistically much.
> 
> Backup matters aside, is there a significant advantage of having a separate
> /home partition at all? If not, just skipping /home and using 70GB for /usr
> (including /usr/home) might be the most practical and flexible approach?

There are some advantages of having separate root (/) /tmp and swap 
partitions.   But, beyond that the major advantages of dividing up
the rest of the space is limited to backup and isolating disk space
that might be accessed by other people.    In the old days it was a
little different with limited addressing and limited size disks.  You
needed to spread things out over multiple disks more than different
partitions on one disk.  

Generally I make root, swap, /tmp and something like /home (not always
called that) and put everything that might grow such as /var/log and
/var/spool, /usr/ports and /usr/local in to that /home (as /home/var.log,
/home/var.spool, /home/usr.ports nd /home/usr.local) with links to 
them.   That way I don't have to guess well in advance about sizes 
for these things.   They can just kind of grow as needed.

Then, of course, it is nice to have a hole nother large disk to dedicate 
to a big disk hungry project such as sound files and editing.  \__/

////jerry

> 
> Thanks.
>