how big should i parition the hd?

Hey guys.

i have 15 gigs set aside for an installation of ubuntu.

I was wondering how much of the 15 gigs should i allocate for the / folder, the /home folder, and the swap file?

ive read the swap file (since im r unning 2gb ram) should be about 512 mb to 1 gb, but im unsure about the / and teh /home folder.

any help is appreciated!

 

I would give to swap 2g (I've done more) and the rest as mount point "/" root.

 

The swap is only used once you've used up all your RAM, so if you don't overload your RAM often, I wouldn't bother with a large swap.

The only reason I would suggest a large swap for normal usage, is that I believe that the swap is used to store the RAM state if you use like, the hibernate function or something. Don't quote me on that though, I'm not 100% sure on it.

 

dont bother with a big swap space with 2GB of ram, you really wont use it, go with 512mb

and the other two you will need to choose on your own, i can give you some advice however.

the /home folder will be used to store your files such as music and stuff like that, so if you have lots of music get lots of /home

the / folder will be used for the operating system itself, this needs to be at least 2GB if i remember correctly.

you can always have no /home folder if you are unsure how you want to distribute the space. If you chose this option it will just put all your stuff in the / folder and you wont have to worry about running out of space on one partition and still having some left on another.

i would recommend that you have a separate /home partition though, because if you want to reinstall the OS later using the CD or something like that you dont need to backup all your data, you can just leave it there and it will be there for you after the reinstall.

hopefully that answers your question. but personnaly myself i would do 512MB for swap, 4GB for /, and the rest for /home, but thats just me, you might choose differently based on how you will use the system