🚀 go-pugleaf

Tadas Osmolskis (tadas@paltech.com) wrote:

: I have a 486DX-33 with 16 MB RAM, and a 425mb hard drive to devote    
: to Linux. How should I partition it? I want a character-based         
: development system with dial-up networking. I'd also like to install  
: X just to see what that's all about.                                  

: So -- how big a swap partition? 

I'd say between 16-32M. I currently have a 20M swap partition with 24M
of RAM and haven't had any problems running out of swap space.

: One swap partition or several?

One should be good.  I'm not quite clear on the way Linux uses swap
partitions.  If it can use more than one simultaneously (like SVr4)
then you might want to have another one when you add another hard
drive.  But with only one spindle there's no point in having more than
one.

: How many partitions for Linux itself?                                 

Having worked with Unix for a number of years I like to do things like
I do on my bigger mini computers with the major filesystems having
their own partitions.  My current configuration looks like so:

Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda2              20003    5969    13001     31%   /
/dev/hda5              29763    6451    21775     23%   /var
/dev/hda6             130770  109582    14435     88%   /usr
/dev/sda3             127896   58456    62836     48%   /home

: How big a root

As you can see from my installation (Slackware v2.2.0), root doesn't
need to be that big. Mine is 20M and has plenty of free space.
Note: Unlike my bigger minis though, I don't have a dedicated /tmp
filesystem. I've simply symlink'd /tmp to /var/tmp.

:, and where do I mount the other(s)? /usr? /usr/bin? /dev/nul?

Given your 425M drive, and assuming that Linux will be the only OS on
it, this scheme might work for you:

	root:		20M
	swap:		16M
	var:		30M
	usr:		200M
	home:		159M

If you don't think you'll need 159M for home, you might give a little
of that over to one of the other partitions such as /usr or swap with
my preference being /usr first and then swap.  However if you think
you might need to have some big temporary files, some extra space in
/var wouldn't hurt either.

-- 
+--------------------+----------------------------+--------------------------+
|   Michael Faurot   |  mfaurot@phzzzt.atww.org   |      I don't like        |
|   ------- ------   |                            |      lima beans!!        |
+--------------------+----------------------------+--------------------------+