The question that wont die: What size partitions should I make?

[Uncle Deejy-Pooh]

> >I have dual-boot laptop, 30GB Fat32 Win2000 and 70GB FreeBSD 6.0-R. I 
> >plan to use this for normal home desktop use (not as a server). I have 
> >512MB RAM.
> 
> According to this page:
> 
>    
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html
> 
> I should use:
> 
>    / = 100MB
>    /swap = 1GB
>    /var = 50MB
>   /usr = rest (68GB)
> 
> On past FreeBSD installs, I would occasionaly do things as root, and ran 
> out of space in /root.  Since then, on desktop machines (with 250GB 
> drives), I would make / be 4GB.  On my lapatop, I wouldn't want to give 
> up 4 of my 70 gigs if I didn't have to.  So I am looking for a realistic 
> number that wont cramp me, and wont waste too much space.  I am planning 
> on 1GB, so it will be big enough to hold the contents of a 700MB CD ISO.
> 
> I have no idea how much of /var I need, other than I like to install 
> various packages to try them out, and I would not want to limit 
> something like a webserver or email server if I chose to run one for 
> limited use.  A friend took the default install suggestions for a 
> machine he planned to do some web development on, and said his /var was 
> way too small (they were new to FreeBSD also).  I am guessing 5GB for 
> /var would allow me to run a mail-server (for personal use) and 
> Apache+extensions for limited website developement
> 
> A swap of 1GB is fine, I'm not sure I've ever actually used any swap on 
> my machines that had more than 128MB.
> 
> I want /usr to be as big as possible (obviously), so my primary user 
> account will have as much space as possible in /use/home/<account>.
> 
> Should I use:
> 
>    / = 1GB
>    /swap = 1GB
>    /var = 5GB
>   /usr = rest (63GB)

	Can't see the problem. If your 'doing things as root' , it doesn't mean that 
you have to save the output of whatever-it-is in the / directory. If you 
start to run short of space in var, or anywhere else, you could put it 
in /usr/var2, for example, and put a symlink in /var to it.

	Regards
			Deej