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I'm planning to install Fedora on my home computer and have done a little research about how big partitions I need. My suggestion is:

Swap - 4GB

/boot - 250MB

/ - 15GB

/var - 5GB

/home - rest (of a 500GB disk)

I'm planning to use this as my main OS, so I'm going to do a little of gaming (WoW), film watching and developing (WEB, C#, C++,). So what do you think about my setting? Something not optimal?

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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 5 '10 at 9:46

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When you say C#, I'm assuming you mean with the .NET platform. You can do some interesting stuff with .NET on Linux, but there isn't a full implementation just yet. –  baultista Aug 5 '10 at 14:35

3 Answers 3

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Personally I think you should skip setting up a separate /home and /var for your personal system. Create a moderately sized root partition and setup a good backup system. If you have a good backup, then setting up separate partitions really doesn't give you anything useful. If you don't plan on having a good backup then you are probably insane anyway, and I am not sure I can provide any help.

Either way setup LVM and do not pre-allocate all your disk space. You can add additional space to volumes as needed

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Separate /var .. OK, that can be unnecessary on a home desktop. But separate /home unnecessary? IMHO a separate /home makes it possible to switch to another distribution (or upgrading the current one to next generation) much more easier. Just scrap the / partition, leave the /home alone, enjoy the next distribution. –  Janne Pikkarainen Aug 5 '10 at 7:29
Yeah, i've read that a seperate /home gives you the ability to scrap the OS and start over with everything at ur home intact so i thought i was a good idea. maybe up the / to 20BG and drop /var then? –  Jason94 Aug 5 '10 at 7:40
@Janne, I have seen large numbers of posts on the forums/irc where a new user, who had no backup, somehow got the impression that the seperate home protected them. The blindly install and lose everything because the hit the wrong button at some point. If they spent their time/effort on backups then they can easily restore /home. Can you really feel confident that all installers are bug-free and won't trash your /home? –  Zoredache Aug 5 '10 at 8:00
To put it a different way a seperate /home gives many people a reason to be over-confident. A reason to believe that a potentially very damaging process is perfectly safe. –  Zoredache Aug 5 '10 at 8:05
@Zoredache, well... backup is nice, but of home? i planning to use home to store all documents, world of warcraft, pr0n, and home video :D The only things need backup is documents and homevideo which i already do to a eksternal drive. backup the entire disk (500gb) is waste i think (nothing crucial really) –  Jason94 Aug 5 '10 at 8:41

Seems good to me. :) Only thing is that if you're planning to install a lot of HD space consuming games (such as Battle for Wesnoth with all its datafiles) or other big applications from the Fedora package repositories, then the 15 GB / mount might be on a smallish side. For normal use it's plenty, though.

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Hmm... besides WoW i don't play alot, and I plan to just put the WoW folder (about 12-15GB) in my home folder. Is this wise or should i put it elsewhere? –  Jason94 Aug 5 '10 at 7:16

I would always recommend separating /var from the others, especially when you're only talking 1% of your total drive space. I don't know why everyone seems to think this is not the case on home systems.

The reason I say this is when a native Linux application encounters a situation (bugs, etc.) that cause it to start logging insane amounts of debugging information, those are generally going to wind up in /var/log. It's not abnormal to see log files grow pretty large (1GB+) in just a few hours, and it's nice to catch those early. You can also run into problems with apps eating up /var/tmp, so it's really best practice to keep that sandboxed off from the rest of the filesystems.

Properly sizing /var is worth the 1% drive space loss to save you a potential headache down the road.

If you're not sure how much to allocate to each partition, you could always go LVM partitions formatted with ext3/4 (or any filesystem that supports online resizing). You'll take a little bit of a disk I/O performance hit, so I don't know that it's a good fit for you with gaming, but it would allow you to create your partitions with what you think you'll need initially, with a pool of free "reserve" space. That space can be used to dynamically grow those partitions on the fly, without even requiring you to unmount the filesystems.

Here's a link you may find interesting if you're curious about that aspect of LVM: http://evilhomestereo.net/wp/2008/06/06/lvm-ext3-rocks/

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