HD partitions?

[Jason Stephenson]

Here's what things look like on my FreeBSD system:

jason at casanova:~$ df -h
Filesystem                 Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a                248M     56M    171M    25%    /
devfs                      1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad4s1e                 73G     17G     51G    25%    /home
/dev/ad0s1e                248M    160K    228M     0%    /tmp
/dev/ad0s1f                6.6G    4.6G    1.5G    75%    /usr
/dev/ad0s1d                248M     13M    215M     5%    /var
diderot:/usr/home/www       17G    1.2G     14G     8%    /mnt/www
diderot:/usr/home/jason     17G    1.2G     14G     8%    /mnt/jason
linprocfs                  4.0K    4.0K      0B   100% 
/usr/compat/linux/proc
portal:6465                1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /p

My system is composed of two ATA hard disks, the system disk is 10 GB 
and I have an 80 GB disk mounted as /home. You'll also see two NFS 
mounted systems on there and a couple of extras: linprocfs for linux 
binary compatibility, the portalfs for network portals, and devfs for 
dynamic device creation.

There is also a 2GB swap partition on ad0, the system disk. My system 
has 1 GB of RAM, and this is the recommmended amount. I have to say 
though that my system rarely uses more than a couple KB of swap, and 
that's even when doing something outrageous, like compiling the JDK 1.5 
from sources, which I did this past Tuesday.

To translate the above into something linux-specific:

Filesystem                 Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/hda1                248M     56M    171M    25%    /
devfs                      1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/hdb1                 73G     17G     51G    25%    /home
/dev/hda2                248M    160K    228M     0%    /tmp
/dev/hda3                6.6G    4.6G    1.5G    75%    /usr
/dev/hda4                248M     13M    215M     5%    /var


On a 200-GB disk, I'd recommend something like the following:

swap 2x RAM
/ 256MB
/usr 10GB
/tmp 256MB
/var 512MB
/home -> the rest.

However, the above can easily change depending upon which distro you 
choose to install. I'd recommened the above for most distros, Debian, 
Slackware, or for just about any of the BSD OS. Red Hat likes to make a 
/boot partition and the put everything else in one big partition. I 
don't know what SuSe would try to do, 'cause I've never used it.

If you find yourself wanting disk space for a web server or database, 
you can always configure the program to store it's data in /home/. I do 
this on my webserver with apache's root set to /home/www and the mysql 
datafiles stored in /home/mysql.