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

[Subhro]

wrangled sat at his 'puter and typed on 12/5/2005 0:10:
>
> 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.
That is a VERY VERY BAD idea. It is not recommended to do ANYTHING as 
root which can be done as some other non privileged user.
>
> 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
Generally the maximum space is eaten up by the logs and the databases 
(if any) hosted on the system.
>
> 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.

Depends solely on the applications you are trying to run on the box.
>
> 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)

This is my personal scheme for my desktop which hosts my personal 
website and a very very small database which is basically my phone 
directory and appointment schedules.

/ = 128M
<swap>=2G
/var = 2G
/var/tmp = 128M
/usr = rest.

/tmp is symlinked to /var/tmp.

Now my system specs:

Athlon 64Fx-55
1G DDR 400M RAM
3*160G SATA150 Western Digital in RAID 5
ASUS K8N-SLI DX motherboard.

Again, nothing is absolute. Your requirement would dictate your labeling 
scheme.

Thanks
S.

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