Best partitioning scheme for my HDD? Please advise.

[Sten Daniel Soersdal]

Joe Vender wrote:
> I have a 6120MB HDD which will be dedicated to FreeBSD 6.2. I intend to 
> install the ports collection and also KDE. I will operate from the KDE 
> environment using FreeBSD as a standalone desktop machine connected to the 
> net via a dialup internet connection. What would be the best sizes for the 
> disk partitions so that I don't run out of space on any of them while also 
> leaving the maximum amount of space possible for the future software to be 
> installed?
> My partitions will be:
> /
> swap
> /var
> /tmp
> /usr
> 
> as suggested using the auto option during slice creation.
> 
> I've found that if I use the default sizes that are chosen by the installer 
> using the auto option, the /usr partition fills up before everything is 
> installed and the installation fails. If I remember correctly, the auto 
> feature sets the sizes around the following sizes for my HDD:
> /				~500MB
> swap			~600MB
> /var				~1300MB
> /tmp			~ 500MB
> /usr				~3GB
> 

Perhaps it is possible to reduce / to ~128 mb? boot up and see
estimate that you need several mb free and estimate double of
/boot/kernel directory (if you install new kernel you get to keep the
old one, therefore estimate double that directory size).
Swap ... well for a successful crash dump you need as much as swap as
you have memory.
/var can be further reduced to perhaps 512mb or perhaps even less?
if you do buildworld then /var/tmp/ might be used more. Perhaps you
could merge / and /var and symlink /var/tmp with say /usr/tmp ?
/tmp can be reduced, you can even remove it completely and use tmpfs for
that partition.
/usr needs the rest

Just a (cluttered) suggestion.

The cool part about FreeBSD is what you can get away with, just by
symlinking (ln -s) a few folders here and there. After all, it's just
your desktop, right?

-- 
Sten Daniel Soersdal