Red Hat 6.2 Installation

[sgordon at kenan.com (Seth Gordon)]

> I have been trying to install Linux Red Hat 6.2 and to be very frank I
> am new to the linux world. I have a 20 GB hard disk and I partioned 5 GB
> for linux. I am able to reach the point in the installation procedure
> where it asks me the partion details.

If you look through the HOWTOs, you can find advice about how to partition
a hard drive.  However, that advice was written when hard drives were more
expensive -- these days, if you're buying a new computer, it's hard to find
a hard drive *smaller* than 4 GB.

I recently had to re-partition the hard drive on one of my machines; this
was running Red Hat 6.0 and had a 6 GB drive.  Before I repartitioned, I
made some notes on how the files were distributed.

/bin  (essential command binaries)    5 MB
/boot (files needed to boot up)       5 MB
/dev  (special files for devices)     3 MB
/etc  (host-specific configuration)   3 MB
/home (user home directories)       362 MB
/lib  (essential shared libraries)   25 MB
/sbin (system binaries)               4 MB
/tmp  (temporary files)              <1 MB
/usr  (various other stuff)         947 MB
      /usr/bin      102 MB
      /usr/doc      122 MB
      /usr/include   10 MB
      /usr/lib      315 MB
      /usr/local     36 MB
      /usr/sbin       7 MB
      /usr/share    260 MB
      /usr/src        4 MB
      /usr/X11R6     54 MB
/var  (logs, Web pages, database)    35 MB

(For more information on what should go in each directory, you might want
to check out the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard at
http://www.pathname.com/fhs, although Linux distributions don't completely
follow the FHS.)

When I repartitioned and installed Red Hat 6.2, I set it up like this:

/boot      on /dev/hda1:     7 MB
/usr       on /dev/hda5:  1506 MB
/usr/local on /dev/hda6:  1506 MB
/var/lib   on /dev/hda7:  1004 MB
/var/web   on /dev/hda8:   635 MB
/home      on /dev/hda9:   300 MB
swap space on /dev/hda10:  258 MB
/tmp       on /dev/hda11:  258 MB
/var/log   on /dev/hda12:  258 MB
/          on /dev/hda13:  156 MB
/opt       on /dev/hda14:  101 MB
/var       on /dev/hda15:  101 MB

This number of partitions is probably overkill, especially if (as your
question implies) you are going to be dual-booting Linux and another OS,
but something like this scheme may work for you.  Note that I picked large
values for /var/lib and /var/web, and made them separate partitions,
because I'm planning to run this machine as a Web server and database
server.  (Under my previous partitioning scheme, there was no /var
partition, and so all of the /var stuff got stored in my / partition, which
only had 80 MB.  Oops.)

-- 
"The big dig might come in handy ... for a few project managers
 whom I think would make great landfill."  --Elaine Ashton
== seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer ==
== documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==
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