my disk partition set up

seems fine, i would point out that i would be very surprised if you needed 50gb for /root, but then again space isn't exactly at a premium

@benj1 thanks for your input.
Yes I would be suprised if I needed 50GB for /root
It is a fact that in buiding machines these days the hard drives are so much cheaper/GB than just a few years ago.
I am paricularly interested in the fact that I have a sensible partition setup/file system as ext4/swap=RAM etc ...

it sounds fine to me, even though I think there will be a bit less than 1000gb available as there is some overhead to the file system, which on a drive that size takes up a few GB I am sure.

I personally make a 32MB ext2 partition for /boot this doesn't have to be automounted and can actually be portable between distros. I also probably wouldn't go with ext4, I have found xfs to work quicker for me and jfs to consume less resources so I usually choose xfs for powerful computers and jfs for weaker ones.

I have played around a bit with ext4 and I really cannot seem to get it to perform much if any better than ext3 for my uses and at that point why not run ext3 more things are compatible with it, even though ext4 is supposed to be backward compatible and ext3 forward compatible in practice this isn't always so. (Obviously if you need nanosecond time stamps, more than 32k subdirectories you would want ext4 over 3) That being said I have an ext4 / and /home on my karmic system and I can say that I don't have any real complaints.

Your welcome; Currently I dual boot Gentoo and Ubuntu. The main reason why I do it is to run my Karmic system with grub .97 rather than grub2. I have had several problems with the new grub and this is a pretty good solution for me. Now, Gentoo documentation recommends the /boot not be mounted at all unless you need to edit it, but when I wrote my fstab I decided to mount it like normal as security isn't a real concern on a household computer, as everyone that uses either knows what they are doing or don't have rights to access it.

I don't think any distro requires it, but many recommend it, here is a discussion from the Arch forum on this issue which you may find illuminating: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=85728

This article on filesystems which is pretty old, still has some interesting information: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388

I just partition my drave as all /
and then have 1GB of swap

Everything that is not put in other partitions (typically /boot and /home) is all put in what is set aside for root (i.e. /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib...)
In short, programs go in / and user files go in /home and so appropriate partitions sizes should be decided based on this.

Edit this is assuming that the OP meant '/' when they wrote "/root" You are right, little to nothing should go in the actual "/root" folder
/ != /root != root
All VERY different roots

Last edited by valbaca (2010-07-15 00:49:29)

BTW if you don't plan on hibernating, I think its safe to use a smaller swap. 1GB at the most.

Or even completely remove swap partition. If you have 3 GB of RAM, as I see it, swap is really unnecessary. I've got 2 GB of RAM, yet still I didn't create swap partition and my system is working fine (:

Just for my 2 cents worth, I like to use a swap file rather than a swap partition, ok there is a small overhead but can make life simpler for people who are used to a windows set up of the classic one big c: drive, You can then backup a single partition and not worry about restoring a file system and swap partitions.
The other useful advantage is it is very easy to either grow, shrink, move to another disk or create more than 1 swapfile, It's a lot easier than trying to move partitions around later on.

I also agree with above comment 50GB for /root is very generous, 15GB is a good size for most people, remember this is #! it's meant to be a small footprint.