Need help with mount points during fresh install

Question

I have decided to wait for Windows 8 Consumer Preview...

but till then i decided to try various linux distro

currently i dual boot with w7 n ubuntu my ubuntu is one big partition / and a swap partition

i need a guide or something that tells me best way to reformat and use divv mount points like a diff /boot and diff /home....

i need help with what file size and which mount points store what....

Answer 1

This varies greatly depending on what you plan to use the machine for. However that wouldn't be a very helpful answer. So:

Using the guided partitioning is fine for use a desktop PC. This will put everything into one partition so you wont exhaust disk space on a partition unless you run out of disk space.

I prefer to put /home onto its own partition so you can replace the OS without having to restore you home directory. In that scenario give / (root) partition 10GB so you wont have to worry about a shortage of disk space for installing applications.

For a file server, backup server for a small office, where you have multiple users, a similar setup is fine, although I would put backups into /home/backup/ on it's own disk.

Web servers with databases, or mail servers should have a separate /tmp directory, the size can vary but something like 3GB is usually adequate. Having a separate /tmp directory allows you to mount it with noexec for a bit of extra security. It also stops runaway mail queues or database queries from using the entire disk space as there is a hard limit as files cannot grow bigger than that partition.

For server, you generally don't have GUI applications, so / (root) partition can be 3GB.

You should also have a separate /var/ directory for servers to prevent log files, spool files etc growing too large and consuming all disk space. I suggest around 5GB is reasonable.

If you need a separate /boot partition, 100MB is adequate.

You can use LVM to give you the ability to resize partitions later.

In conclusion it depends entirely on what you will use the machine for, if in doubt put it all in one partition. If you cannot afford downtime, use LVM so you can resize later.