partition order and size

[calymea]

Hi, this may sound rather basic, but I just want to make sure I've got it right. Can someone advise the relative sizes and order (which one first, second, etc) for the root, home and swap partitions. I intend to give "LMDE" around 50-60GB on a bootable 500GB USB drive, as this is the way I installed Linux Mint 11 main edition and it works perfectly. Just need a little help with the partitioning. It will be on a separate USB hard to the Main Edition BTW. Thanks.

[viking777]

It honestly doesn't matter. You don't even need a home or a swap partition, Linux will run quite happily without them. Swap partitions are needed to 'hibernate' a machine though so if you want to use that it is best to have one, but most machines have so much memory these days that swap will hardly ever get used, for example my computer has been running for 2hrs 40 and it has used just 12Mb of swap space. The old adage for swap used to be = to the amount of installed memory, but for most modern machines this is just wasted space. I would say put an upper limit of 2Gb on it.

This is a good link to read:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq