[ltp] 600x

[wes schreiner]

Adam wrote:

>I was browsing this link on a thinkpad:
>
>http://electriclichen.com/people/jgleason/thinkpad.html
>
>I followed steps at #13 to partition the drive. And then the RH claims
>that "Your root partition is less than 250 megabytes which is usually
>too small to install Red Hat Linux."
>
>Can you explain how it reaches this conclusion?
>
>  
>
It's probably just being overly pessimistic about the space needed. It 
is probably assuming you aren't going to create /var or /tmp partitions. 
The page you refer to suggests a partitioning scheme of:

/ 200MB
/usr 900MB
/home 1000MB
/var 100MB
/tmp 100MB
swap (RAMx3)

That's pretty small, probably too small for most Red Hat installs. The 
page author is trying to squeeze Linux and Windows together on a 4GB 
drive. This partitioning scheme will work, but will be too small if you 
try to install lots of software (/usr will get filled) or try to use 
certain programs (/tmp would get full). Setting the swap partition to 
RAMx3 makes sense for the page author's 32MB of RAM, but if you have a 
lot more RAM then a swap size of RAMx2 or RAMx1.5 would be sufficient.

Tell us what you want to use your TP for and how much disk space you can 
devote to Linux and we can suggest a better partitioning scheme. Without 
knowing what you want to do I would suggest something more like:

/ 200MB
/usr 1500MB
/var 200MB
/tmp 300MB
swap RAMx2
/home all remaining space

If you are going to download huge files, like CD .iso files, with 
Mozilla then you will want a /tmp of about 700MB, because Mozilla 
downloads files to /tmp and only after the download is complete does it 
copy the file to where you want. If you are going to install lots and 
lots of software you will want a /usr more like 2000MB.

If partitioning seems too complicated you can get away with not doing it 
at all, though I would still suggest creating a separate swap partition 
at least. With only one hard drive the main advantage to having distinct 
/, /usr, /var, /home, etc. partitions is so that if something goes wrong 
you only get a single full partition, and seeing which partition gets 
full can help determine what the problem is. I have often installed 
Linux on tiny hard drives with no more than two partitions, one for swap 
and one for everything else. The advantage of not wasting space with 
improperly-sized partitions outweighs the disadvantages when there isn't 
much space to begin with.

wes