Recommended sizes for / and /home directories?

[Tom_Accuosti]

I have a Dell laptop (Precision M70, 1 gb RAM) with a 40 gb hard drive that is set up like this:
WinXP: 16gb
Mint 10: 16 gb
Win Hibernation: 2gb
Linux Swap: 2 gb

I thought I had set this up with a separate /home partition, but I discovered this over the weekend when I wanted to install Mint 12. Actually, for the last year I have been reclaiming old laptops, installing Mint on them, and then giving them to people who can use them, and I always use a separate /home, in case I need to reinstall. This, naturally, is my personal machine, and I apparently did this before I learned better.

Anyway, I have saved my data, and I'm ready to create some new partitions. Because I don't have a lot of room, I was wondering how much space I need to allocate for each partition. I expect to be installing Mint 12 (DVD edition), Cinnamon, LibreOffice, some utilites, a couple of different web browsers, maybe Evolution. The data that I backed up is only about 4 gb.

Also, will it make any difference as to which would be the "extended" partition? I seem to remember that 4 partitions is my limit.

Thanks

[xenopeek]

4 partitions is the limit, so one of the 4 partitions should be an extended partition--in which you can create as many logical partitions as you want.

You should be fine with a / of 8 GiB. 5 GiB is the minimum size, so perhaps even just 5, 6 or 7 GiB will work--especially if you will also uninstall some default applications (like remove MATE). I'm running Linux Mint 12 in VirtualBox with 6 GiB / without issues. Use the rest of the disk for /home.

I recall there being a away to have Linux and Windows use the same swap file, I can't find it right now though...

[Tom_Accuosti]

I remembered the 5 gb min from the setup, but we always want to have a little extra. And since my data is mostly text and pictures, I could probably split it 8 & 8, and keep some of my pics on another PC, or better - on a USB hard drive.

I think I'll set up the / and /home directories as logical partitions on the extended partition. This way I can leave the swap and hibernate space alone, since I often find myself hibernating a desktop on either OS. Does that sound like it should work?

Alternately, maybe I should look at buying a 80 or 120 gb drive, and imaging the WinXP over to it, and keeping the old 40 gb as a backup drive.

[xenopeek]

8 & 8 as two logical partitions sounds fine, and from the installation DVD you can always run GParted to resize those partitions if needed. Sure, a 80 GB hard disk will give more room

[Morrog]

i've been running LMDE for about a year now. 10GB root folder and the rest of my partition (35GB) goes to my /home.
I still have 8GB left in my / (i could probably clean it a bit, but i should look up how), and still plenty of room in /home.

here's what my complete disk looks like
sda1 (Windows 7) 30GB
sda4 (data partition) 240GB
sda2 (extended partition)
sda5 (LMDE 64b) 10GB
sda7 (/home) 35GB
swap 1,5GB

and it works for me

[Habitual]

viewtopic.php?f=90&t=11872

[Tom_Accuosti]

i've been running LMDE for about a year now. 10GB root folder and the rest of my partition (35GB) goes to my /home.
I still have 8GB left in my / (i could probably clean it a bit, but i should look up how), and still plenty of room in /home.

Mint is running on 2gb? Why does the installer tell you to make sure you've got 5gb?

Also, thanks for confirming my thoughts on extended partitions. Of course, now that I'm really giving this some thought, maybe I should check Amazon for a larger laptop drive. My intention is to make the Dell my regular home machine, and get rid of my desktop monitor & tower.

[Morrog]

no, mint is running on 10GB of which 8GB (now 6GB) is used. so on my root partition i have 2-4GB left. and my home partition is 35GB.

[Tom_Accuosti]

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=11872

Yup, I read that, and that's how I've set up computers for other people in the past. My concern is that I've only got 16 gb to work with, and I don't want to create a partition too small so that I can't install new programs; yet I need to leave myself *some* room for data. Plus, I don't know how much bigger Gnome 3 is going to be over the Gnome 2 installations that I've been used to.

So, it looks like if I split those 16 gb in half, I should be okay for a while, especially if I use an external drive for backups, etc. I've already pared everything I could out of my WinXP side, and resized the drive accordingly.