Very Computer

I'm reinstalling Linux on my computer and want to know how to partition it.
I was using RH5.0 and I had 2 partitions:
One 60M partition for /
and one 1800M partition for /usr

I did this at the suggestion of a couple of linux books I have but I ran out
of disk space for /.
Is there any way to resize the root (/) partition?
Also, do I even need multiple partitions?  I'm using a 2G hard drive by
itself so I'm not installing through multi drives.  Why would you partition
it the way I did anyway?

Thanks
Shawn

If replying by email please remove the .dot.

Quote:>  Why would you partition it the way I did anyway?

Also, since things in / don't change as often as what's in /usr (which
used to include the users' home directories), keeping them separate
would perhaps reduce fragmentation of the / filesystem.  But don't worry
about that one.

Sometimes / and /usr (and nowadays /var and /home) are put on separate
disks (note, *disks*, not just partitions).  This can help with
performance.  For example, if you have /home and / on separate disks,
you are in your home directory in /home/user and do a

vi file

the vi executable is read in from one disk (/) and the file is read from
another (/home), so you get some extra performance from the parallel
accesses.  I've read that extra performance can happen if some
combination of /, /home, /usr, /var, /tmp, etc. are kept on separate
disks, but I don't know the full details of how much performance
increase to expect, which are most important to split up, and on what
operations additional performance would be significant.

Actually, this is probably worth some modern research, since CPUs and
RAM have increased in speed much more than hard disks over the past 10
or so years.  Maybe someone has studied that recently...

- Jay Ts

--
Click on http://www.kachina.net/~jay to find out about
Linux Consulting, Web Design and Programming Services.

To be o' not t'be, dat be de bottom line.  What it is, Mama!
        - output of 'fortune | jive'

| >
| > I'm reinstalling Linux on my computer and want to know how to partition it.
| > I was using RH5.0 and I had 2 partitions:
| > One 60M partition for /
| > and one 1800M partition for /usr
| >
| > do I even need multiple partitions?
|
| No.  I don't bother.

[other useful info/opinon snipped]

There are a few advantages to partitioning your disks.

1) fsck time - Most linux systems I've seen run fsck after an ext2
partition has been mounted so many times (20 on Debian). If you've got
a particularly large disk with just a single partition this fsck can
take a considerable amount of time. Personally I partition my disk(s)
and stagger the number of mounts after which fsck will be run for each
partition. This minimizes the amount of time any one boot will take
doing an fsck. Of course if your system runs 24/7 this isn't as much
of an issue.

2) backups - Many larger installation prefer to do backups on a
per-partition basis and stagger when "level 0" backups are done on a
particular partition. It's more efficient this way and allows you to
more easily restore specific files that might need restoring.

Of course, for personal systems, it's really just a matter of
preference.

To the original poster, you can read the mini-HOWTO for partitioning
and maybe get some ideas. Take a peek at:

http://www.ssc.com/linux/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Partition.html

Gary