Xubuntu pre-install questions

[Ian Petersen]

On 4/21/07, Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> - 10 gigs for /
> - a swap partition
> - the rest is /home.  Any odds-and-ends that don't belong to a specific
>   account go into /home/misc
>
>   My questions are...
>   1) What is the recommended size for /, assuming I install "the works"?
>   2) What is the recommended size for the swap partition?
>   3) What is the recommended filesystem? (ext3fs, reiserfs, whatever)
>
>   Any helpful pre-install hints would be appreciated.

My system at home has a 2 Gig / and everything else is on LVM volumes.
 When I say everything else, I mean /home, /opt, /tmp, /usr, /var,
etc.  I find this setup to be very flexible.  I leave /bin and /sbin
on the same partition that holds / so I can boot to a mostly-usable
system even without LVM.

As for a swap partition, I'd recommend using a swap file instead.  In
2.6 kernels the speed difference between swap partitions and swap
files is negligble to non-existant but swap files are much more
flexible because you can add and remove them as you see fit.

Regarding filesystems, I'm partial to ReiserFS, but I hear that
version 3 (the only stable version) is basically in maintenance mode
and that there are some fundamental problems with it.  (I don't
remember the details but SuSE, who used to use ReiserFS by default,
has switched away from it.)  I think ext3 is the standard these days.
I think both ext3 and ReiserFS can be resized while the filesystem is
mounted, which is a big boon if you're using LVM and want to resize
one of your logical partitions.

One caveat is that the system I'm describing is Gentoo, so most of the
user-ish binaries end up in /usr/bin so I'm not really at risk of
running out of space on /.  I don't know where Xubuntu puts things so
you may need a bigger / partition.  I'd expect both distros to mostly
adhere to the filesystem hierarchy standard, though, so I'd just go
ahead with 2 Gigs if it were me.

Ian

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