Re: tlug: Caldera Japanese version (more comments)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> Andrew wrote

    >> In a completely different matter, I currently only have about
    >> 1GB free on a 4GM drive for Linux.  Without deleting my MP3
    >> collection, is 1GM reasonably large enough for Linux, KDE, Star
    >> Office, Word Perfect, and various other apps a Linux
    >> workstation might want/require?  If it is not large enough,
    >> what is?

1GB is probably enough for the base system, apps, swap, and variable
stuff (eg, fonts for TeX, log files for daemons, etc).  But to be
comfortable you'll have to go through the package manager by hand and
delete stuff you don't want by hand.  For example, Emacs or XEmacs can 
easily consume 50-80MB, TeX about the same, and so on.  If you install 
all of the non-Emacs text editors (which some distributions do), you
can easily use up another 30MB.

Now you have to figure out what your own data requirements are.  Eg, I 
record my lectures (2x week) and put them up as MP3s for the students
to download.  For paranoia's sake I keep the originals as well as the
ones in the Web archive (the MDs get recycled): that's 18 x 2 x 15MB,
or over 500MB.  I suppose your MP3 collection isn't that big yet....

But if you decide to do serious audio or (urk) video work, if you find 
that you want to mirror a serious portion of the Web, do analysis of
real-time logs ....

Who knows what data space requirements lurk in the hearts of men?  The 
Shadow....

I also have a Linux system at home, which routes my HAN to the outside 
world, living happily in a 300MB hard drive with over 200MB free,
running on a 486SX/25 (yup, math emulation compiled in!)

So it comes down to "What do you want to do today?"

>>>>> "Marc" == Marc E Christensen <marc@example.com> writes:

    >> After reading over other emails describing partitions, what
    >> would you all recommend for as far as partition sizes are
    >> concerned?

    Marc> I'd like to hear what other people think on this.  I
    Marc> personaly make a 1 - 500 meg / (root), 20 meg /boot, 500meg
    Marc> /home and the rest (read 'largest' for /usr which is
    Marc> typically around a gig at least.  You may want to seperate
    Marc> /var or /home/{httpd.ftp} depending on if you host web sites
    Marc> (its a shame DSL or other cheap. steady bandwidth is not
    Marc> avalable in Japan yet...).  Good luck.

/	    50MB x 2 (take two, they're small:  ease of repair)
            This has saved my ass several times when I needed to reboot
	    and be running again quickly.  One time, since it wasn't
            mounted or in /etc/fstab, it left a cracker without access 
	    to his rootkit ;-) his ass is now grass, or he won't
            graduate from Georgia Tech, anyway (3d offense).  25MB
	    used to be plenty, but then "Drepper bloat" struck and now
	    /lib is like 8MB yuck, and that's not counting the
	    valuable stuff in /lib/modules.
/usr	    750MB - full C/Perl/Python/XEmacs development system,
            web servers and clients, X11, etc.  GNOME and similar BS is
	    there because so much stuff now depends on them and they're
	    not all that big
/var	    250MB - logfile paranoia and also Debian upgrades fill it
	    fast, and I did once have du /var/spool/lpd over 50MB ;-)
/var/www    1GB - too small, what with all them MP3s ;-)
/tmp	    100MB - overkill, I think
/home	    1GB - contains two full XEmacs source trees, the XEmacs
	    package sources, and the pre-edit MP3s.
/usr/local  250MB - almost unused, now that I know how to make my own
	    packages; however, at one time 500MB was tight.
/cdimage    750MB - for burning CDs, more efficient
/codapa...  Assorted partitions related to the Coda file system, if
	    you don't know what it is, don't worry....

Why?

(1) / is small because it doesn't need to be bigger; I can keep
    multiple copies, back it up conveniently.  Basically it's just the 
    Debian 8-floppy kit, preinstalled.
(2) /usr needs to be 500MB--1GB these days, I'm afraid.  Lots of bloat 
    and duplication.  X11, Motif, Gtk, Perl, Emacs, etc---all large
    packages with more and more features.  The distributions do not do 
    a good job of allowing you to select what you want _intelligently_.
(3) /var, /home, and /usr/local should be separate partitions because
    these are _your_ data, not the distribution's.  It is often
    sensible to "upgrade" by doing a complete reinstall; this way you
    can reformat / and /usr without worries.  (/etc had better be
    fully backed up of course, but it's small.)  Size for /home and
    /usr/local depends on what you need, of course.
(4) /var and /tmp should be separate partitions because it's quite
    possible that a program will start spewing logs or tempfiles and
    fill them up.  If that happens, well-behaved programs can lose
    data.  A couple hundred MB between them is plenty though, _unless_ 
    you're running servers (including mail); then you should keep
    plenty of slack so you don't lose your logs.
(5) /var/www and /home/ftp (or whatever) should probably be separate
    partitions, especially /home/ftp: it makes chroot environments
    more secure.  I also find it convenient for administration.  Size
    is obviously "tekito-ni".

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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