Re: [Sheflug] Re: Partitioning

[Richard Stevenson <nospam [at] team.xtra.co.nz>]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, Ian Wright wrote:

> I think the thing which seemed to be a sticking point from my limited
> experience was the fact that, when you install a program from an .rpm (may
> be different with other methods but the ones I have compiled from source
> semmed the same) virtually everything gets put in /usr. Consequently, unlike
> windoze where apart from the sprinkling of .dlls into the windows directory
> on C\:, it doesn't matter a damn where the rest of the program lives, it
> appears that in linux the size of your main /usr partition governs the
> available program space on the machine. The impression I also get is that it
> is not easy to spread this /usr partition across more than one physical
> drive without a lot of clever fiddling in the kernel and things. When I set
> the machine up initially with two disk drives I did put the /usr/local on a
> different drive to the /usr partition but it just seemed like a waste of
> space as virtually nothing went in there. Perhaps I just haven't got into
> the mindset of keeping a tidy computer yet, I know I'm still confused as to
> what you should do with all the different partitions -like what is the
> difference between /usr/local and /home or between / and /root.

I *always* put stuff I build (and there's a lot) into /usr/local - that
way, no stupid vendor is going to mess up my system by "upgrading" things,
with a few exceptions (mail utilities will almost always look for Sendmail
in /usr/sbin/sendmail, for example, so you need to watch that).

I tend to put /var on a separate partition, so growing logfiles don't mess
up anything else; /home is always separate because I'm a space hog :)

Oh, and I'd like to have space to build and burn iso images, but that disk
I need is sitting in a box in my garage right now :-)

Cheers

Richard



-- 
Richard Stevenson, Systems Support Specialist, Telecom Xtra
Phone: +64 9 355 5231   Mobile: +64 25 290 3101   Pager: +64 26 100 155

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