[NTLUG:Discuss] Kubuntu upgrade question

[william jones]

----- Original Message ----
From: Dennis Rice <dennis at dearroz.com>
To: "NTLUG, Discuss" <discuss at ntlug.org>
Sent: Friday, March 2, 2007 1:13:57 PM
Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] Kubuntu upgrade question


Wayne Dahl wrote:
> > Never saw this show up on the list, not sure why...but resending...
> >
> > This may be a stupid question, but every time I do something involving
> > partitioning a hard drive, I never seem to get /var big enough and I
> > have problems later...like, is there a way to tell Adept or Synaptic to
> > download upgrade files to a different directory than /var/****?  I
> > increased /var to 2.9Gigs last time I had to partition my hard drives
> > (when I installed a new 300Gig SATA drive) and again, I find it's not
...

From experience only, since the /var directory is used to store 
"variable" data, it must be of sufficient size to support different 
actions.  One often not taken into account is the system update.  I use 
yum, but assume the same is true for apt-get or other update utilities. 
  Processing of these update files is in the /var directory, requiring a 
sizable area.

I would suggest that the /var directory be no less than 5 GB for a 
starter, larger if you can afford it.  With a 300 GB drive, this should 
be no problem to allow 10 GB partition.

Dennis

Dennis,

I have wrestled with disk partitioning since adopting the Coherent operating system while Linus Torvalds was still in high school.  At the time, I had Windows, OS/2, and Coherent all on a 512 mB disk.  Coherent required 10MB, but more was  (much) better.  Commercial users can find their own solutions.  The following is for home users.

All distributions I use have a default partitioning as a choice at installation.  In the past, this normally deleted whatever was on the hard disk, then installed a root (/) and swap partition, using the whole disk.  If there were more than 1024 cylinders on the hard  disk, the distributor recommended  making a small boot partition, five or ten megabytes, as  well as root patition and a swap partition twice as large as memory.  Later, most distributions provided a method and instructions for shrinking an existing Microsoft OS, then dividing up the remainder of the hard disk for root and swap.  Feature creep caused the default offering to inlude /boot, /home, and sometimes others.  A version of BSD I bought had a default partitioning of several directories.

The user should investigate this default.  If it meets user needs, then accept it.  No distributor I know provides a separate default partition for /var or /opt, the directories where applications store some of their programs.   They just leave them in the root partition.  Doing your own partitioning, rather than accepting the defaults, should be left for such things as  using a separate disk for /home or working with raid.  The home user trying to work with three or more operating systems gets best wishes, but no help from me.

William L. Jones
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