Re: [tlug] Using TAR

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

Christopher SEKIYA wrote:
> 
> Hrm.  "Classic" UNIX system loadout[1] is as follows:
> 
> /		64M
> swap		= memory installed
> /var		32M if not a mailhost, as needs dictate otherwise
> /usr		256M
> /usr/X11R6	64M
> /home		512M or so, depending on personal preference
> /usr/local	the balance

If you have a bigger drive, I would simply scale these numbers by some factor 
and then give the excess to /home.

>>Naturally that 376 mb was filling up almost immediately.
>>
> 
> Bloody well shouldn't have.  / should be used for things critical for system
> boot and nothing else.  Hell, everything in / should be statically linked.

You have to remember, Chris, that things work a bit differently in the end user 
world. On Redhat 7.2, a reasonable install will not fit in a 256mb /usr for very 
long, if at all. I tend to give /usr about 2gb on my personal desktop. On a 
server, sure, it looks more like your layout.

Mandrake is based on (originally, though now it is much further away from) 
Redhat, so I would image it is the same way.

Note that /usr is currently 1.5 gb on this Redhat 7.2 system, only 48 mb of that 
being in /usr/local and 124 mb in /usr/X11R6.

Is this A Good Thing? Almost certainly not, for some. But Redhat (and Mandrake) 
are trying to make distros that people can use without knowing too much about 
Linux. By default, I think that RH 7.2 (in workstation install mode) makes 
partitions for swap, /boot, and throws everything else in /.

My RH installs on workstations tend to get:

/ 	250 mb
swap  	=memory
/home 
the balance
/var 
1 gb
/usr 
2 gb	
/tmp 
500 mb

There are a couple of reasons for this. I agree with you about swap, make it too 
large and your system doesn't want to do any actual work. I actually don't have 
much of a swap at all, since I have 1 gb of RAM.

Why the hell should /usr and /var be so big? you may ask. Naze ka to iu to, as I 
noted, RPM-based systems like to chew on /usr (namely because of the 
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS tree). And most people simply aren't capable of running 
through their list of RPMs and uninstalling everything they don't need. Lots of 
people have no idea what they *do* need. And /var? Well, I don't want to lose my 
logs, but the key reason is Ximian GNOME. It keeps a cache of its downloaded 
packages in /var/cache/redcarpet. Sure, I could creatively symlink that 
somewhere else, but that is a bit too much trouble for most end users, and I 
just let 'em lie in /var because I want to have them around anyway, and I can't 
think of any other place I want them.

What I am trying to get at here is that the partitioning scheme for modern 
desktop Linux boxen is very different from that of a server.

-Josh