Best way to partition?

[Guzz]

I've been running GNU/Linux for a while now and I'm starting to feel comfortable with it. So now I've decided to throw out Windows from my workstation. This means that I will have 46 GB for Gentoo.
Until now I've just had one ~5GB partition + swap&boot, how should I set it up with all this free space.
Should I have separate partitions for /home, /var and /usr/local? And how big should I make them?
_________________
That's it Mr. Giraff, get all the marmalade.

[salsashark]

There are as many differing opinions of this as there are users, I believe.

Here's my $.02

For my desktop/workstation I run the following with my 26Gb of drives:
(laptop has 28, home has 26, both have 512Mb of RAM)
/boot ~ 128Mb
/ ~ 8000Mb
/home ~ 17000Mb
swap ~ 768Mb
Into the /home I create /home/Music and then ln -s /home/music /music
Thus all my mp3s appear under /music, and I've got a ridiculous amount of app space.

For my work server I use most running NMIS and SNORT on RedHat (no comments!), which has 18Gb of mirrored drive and 1Gb of RAM, it looks like:
/boot ~ 100Mb
swap ~ 1000Mb
/ ~ 6000Mb
/var ~ 10000Mb
With all my databases stored in /var

It really depends on what you are going to do with the box. Security-wise, you should keep a seperate /var, but then again, if it's your desktop, then who really cares? You're running iptables or behind a firewall right? As for /usr/local, I never really cared about it. I keep all my tarballs in /usr/local/src, and if it looks like the sh*t is going to hit the proverbial fan, I just SFTP it onto another machine, just in case, so I don't have to reinstall stuff, wondering "what were the dependencies for this PERL script?" 800 times.

Just my $.02, no more, no less.

[gilgames]

Sounds like you don't have clue how much space you're going to use(waste). A good method is to use LVM so you can easily grow and shrink volumes. I use it on a 40G volume group(two 20G drives). If you're willing to use ext2 you can even resize the filesystems while they're still mounted. Daniel Robbins wrote a very good article on this subject here(http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lvm/?dwzone=linux)

[salsashark]

Like I said, my $.02, and everyone has their own opinion.

That LVM looks pretty snappy! I only see references to ext2 and Reiser so far.. Is ext3 (I have a three-year-old who loves to hit power buttons) supported with reboot?
_________________
man goes into cage, cage goes into salsa, shark's in the salsa.. our shark..

[niyogi]

just make one large partition if you don't know what to do

/boot
/
swap

just like the gentoo installation guide says

-S

[gilgames]

[Malakin]

Except for the first time when I thought there was some point to it for a home user, I've always put everything in a single partition, maybe add a swap if you expect to use it much. 7 years of using Linux and I've never regretted doing it this way.

[Jeevz]

LVM can be pretty cool, if you are interested in it you should try it out.

Otherwise, I would like to note having a seperate partition for /home is a good idea. I used to try many distros and this was a life saver, didn't have to worry about copying my data files. It is also nice if you just want to reinstall gentoo. For practice of course

[Guzz]

Ok, thanks for your replies.
I've decided to make it as easy as possible and I'm going to partition something like this:

swap ~512MB
/boot ~120MB
/ ~6-8GB
/home The rest of it.

Bye bye Windows.

//Johannes
_________________
That's it Mr. Giraff, get all the marmalade.

[bbibber]

LVM is pretty cool but I don't use it for production machines yet. I had my troubles "upgrading" my volumes from one 1.x release to another. Besides, it conflicted (and I think still conflicts) with SGI's XFS patches if you want to patch an ordinary vanilla -kernel.
Like the other guy said: if you don't need the additional security, go for the 1 partition scheme like it says in the docs