Partition Cuts

[kovax]

I was wondering if the default partitions sizes are ok when installing Fedora or RedHat? I have a 40 GB hd and i just want to make sure that my space will be used properly and efficently.

Thanks

[Void Main]

What *are* the default partition sizes? I don't believe I have ever installed and let it choose the partition sizes. I always manually partition. If you don't know what you need then I would hope it picks good defaults. How much RAM do you have and what for what purpose are you building this machine (how will it be used and what software will be run)? Once I know these factors I can tell you whether it's partitioning your system properly. I doubt that what it picks will be a bad choice and it's not like you can't change it later on down the road if the sizes aren't to your liking (resizing partitions isn't too tough).

[worker201]

I think a good rule of thumb is 2x RAM for swap, and the rest allocated as you see fit. A /home partition makes it easier to backup, but you can get away with just swap and /.

[chartoo]

I've installed Fedora on two computers letting Fedora choose how to format the partition. Auto partitioning on Fedora setups up LVs (logical volumes) for, I believe, the swap file and home partitions so all you need is an empty hard drive partition that's at least 3 gig. Obviously a larger partition is better but like Void mentioned you can always repartition later when you understand Linux partitions and file systems better.

I have a 40 GB hd and i....

At the very least I would split the drive in half, you'd have a 20 partition for Fedora and 20 gig more for something else (an Ubuntu or Gentoo for instance) or just for extra storage....

At work I have a 40 GB drive with four partitions, one Mepis Linux, a Knoppix hard drive installation, a persistant home directory and swap partition.

[worker201]

The 80GB hard drive I use for Linux has 2 partitions - 2GB for swap, and the rest is /. Working with large datafiles, I really do need all that space. Linux used to take up 40GB on my other 120GB drive, but I ran out of room! So now I have 2 hard drives. The 80GB is for Linux, and the 120GB has 100GB for NTFS and 20GB for Fat32, which I use to transfer PostScript files between Linux and Windows.

(as soon as there is an open source vector graphics program as good as Illustrator, all 200GB will be for Linux!)

[kovax]

I wanted to set up the server to be a apache webserver. I have 256mb ram. I want to run a few websites and a phpbb forum.
Thanks

[Void Main]

Ok looks like a perfect machine to be a web server. I would keep it simple:

Partitions:
1 - /boot - ext3 - 100MB
2 - swap - swap - 512MB
3 - / - ext3 - rest of disk

You can even get away without a /boot partition but I always create one as it comes in handy sooner or later. They used to be required on large drives or you might not be able to boot but the limitations that required this no longer exist. I guess there still are other good reasons for having a /boot. If you are running RAID or LVM you should have a separate /boot partition that isn't on a LVM or RAID device.

[kovax]

could i make part 3 my /var directory?

Ok looks like a perfect machine to be a web server. I would keep it simple:

Partitions:
1 - /boot - ext3 - 100MB
2 - swap - swap - 512MB
3 - / - ext3 - rest of disk

You can even get away without a /boot partition but I always create one as it comes in handy sooner or later. They used to be required on large drives or you might not be able to boot but the limitations that required this no longer exist. I guess there still are other good reasons for having a /boot. If you are running RAID or LVM you should have a separate /boot partition that isn't on a LVM or RAID device.

[Void Main]

You can but unless you really know what you are going to be doing down the road you may not be sure how large to make the "/var" vs the "/" partition and then somewhere down the road you have to either start jockeying data between partitions and symlinking it or resize your partitions. Basically it's a pain which is why I suggested not going with a separate /var partition. If you really know what you are doing then by all means go ahead and create a separate /var partition. Been there and done that too many times in the past.