[LUNI] Look for some partitioning recommendations

[sean-lynch at sean-lynch.com]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:42:03 -0500
  Michael Salsman <msalsman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have just purchased a 120 GB drive for my Dell D610, 
>and I am trying to figure out the best way to partition 
>the drive, so that my user data is preserved as I dink 
>around with different distros.
> 
> Generally the types of things that I want to preserve 
>are:
> 
> VMWare images
> typical personal stuff ...  music, photos, videos
> 3rd party product installs that do not require any 
>particular paths (typically non-RPM).
> 
> Which partitions/directories tend to be overwritten by 
>different distros, and what could I hope to keep?  I 
>would expect that /opt and /home would be okay, with the 
>thought of mounting them to the / partition. 
> I would want to keep the main distro 
>partition/directories around 10 GB, and then throw the 
>rest to swap and my other stuff.
> 
> Any and all thoughts greatly appreciated!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mike
> 
> -- 
> Linux Users Of Northern Illinois - Technical Discussion 
>http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni
> 

Obviously /home should be in its own partition.

I have also put
/usr/local
/var

in their own partitions.

This works nice if you are using the same distro in 
different ways.

However sharing any of these directories across different 
distros or even across different versions of a distro can 
be problematic.

Different distros often have different versions of 
included software. If the configuration files in your 
/home/user don't match whats needed by the software 
version from one install to another, there can be 
wierdness.

Still, its good to keep /home seperate at a minimum. If 
you have to re-install the same distro, it can help.