Appendix C. Partitioning for Ubuntu value to your needs. Reserve a lot more space if you plan to save a lot of multimedia files (pictures, MP3, movies) in your home directory. For new users, personal Ubuntu boxes, home systems, and other single-user setups, a single / partition (possibly plus a separate swap) is probably the easiest, simplest way to go. However, if your partition is larger than around 6GB, choose ext3 as your partition type. Ext2 partitions need periodic file system integrity checking, and this can cause delays during booting when the partition is large. For multi-user systems or systems with lots of disk space, it’s best to put /var , /tmp , and /home each on their own partitions separate from the / partition. You might need a separate /usr/local partition if you plan to install many programs that are not part of the Ubuntu distribution. If your machine will be a mail server, you might need to make /var/mail a separate partition. Often, putting /tmp on its own partition, for instance 20–50MB, is a good idea. If you are setting up a server with lots of user accounts, it’s generally good to have a separate, large /home partition. In general, the partitioning situation varies from computer to computer depending on its uses. For very complex systems, you should see the Multi Disk HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Multi-Disk-HOWTO.html). This contains in-depth information, mostly of interest to ISPs and people setting up servers. With respect to the issue of swap partition size, there are many views. One rule of thumb which works well is to use as much swap as you have system memory. It also shouldn’t be smaller than 16MB, in most cases. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. If you are trying to solve 10000 simultaneous equations on a machine with 256MB of memory, you may need a gigabyte (or more) of swap. On some 32-bit architectures (m68k and PowerPC), the maximum size of a swap partition is 2GB. That should be enough for nearly any installation. However, if your swap requirements are this high, you should probably try to spread the swap across different disks (also called “spindles”) and, if possible, different SCSI or IDE channels. The kernel will balance swap usage between multiple swap partitions, giving better performance. As an example, an older home machine might have 32MB of RAM and a 1.7GB IDE drive on /dev/sda . There might be a 500MB partition for another operating system on /dev/sda1 , a 32MB swap partition on /dev/sda3 and about 1.2GB on /dev/sda2 as the Linux partition. For an idea of the space required by Ubuntu, check Section D.3. Linux disks and partition names may be different from other operating systems. You need to know the names that Linux uses when you create and mount partitions. Here’s the basic naming scheme: • The first floppy drive is named /dev/fd0 . • The second floppy drive is named /dev/fd1 . • The first hard disk detected is named /dev/sda . • The second hard disk detected is named /dev/sdb , and so on. 107 C.4. Device Names in Linux C.3. Recommended Partitioning Scheme