Swap space settings and other partitioning q's

[Morningdew]

Hello!

I was just curious to know... What are some good rules of thumb for
configuring swap space under Linux? For that matter, are there any
comprehensive guides or articles on the subject? When I used to admin
NT boxes I used to set their "virtual memory" setting to 1.5 times
physical memory, giving 50% over physical as swap. That was just by
convention, or, "rule of thumb". No great scientific methodology, it is
just what had worked for me and my coworkers for so long. Granted,
Linux is different.

On my box I have installed Ubuntu and moved up to the 2.6.10 kernel, if
that matters. I am presently running on two IDE hard drives, 30Mb
Quantum Fireball and 60Mb Seagate ST360020A. As it stands, I have 1Gb
of physical RAM and have two swap partitions, one on each drive and both
494.16Mb. Initially I had set up a 32-bit install on one drive, and a
64-bit (AMD64) on the other. I decided to go with my old NT convention
for grins, and give 50% over physical for swap. But since I have both
swap partitions available, I have both the 32 and 64 bit installs using
both swaps, for a nearly 1:1 phys:swap ratio.

Reason I am asking is because I will be very soon installing a 250Gb
Western Digital SATA drive. Long story on the old one, but short
version is it shot craps before I could ever use it. But now since I
will be getting all this breathing room I will of course be
reconfiguring my partitioning scheme. So given the opportunity I would
like to put some method to the madness.

One consideration, besides size, is location. This question goes beyond
swap space, too. How does Linux like to have it's partitions metered
across multiple drives? Should the root and swap be on different
physical drives or does it matter? If it is better to separate, which
would benefit most from "the faster drive"? Does it actually help to
split the swap amongst partitions on differing drives, similar to (yes,
remotely similar to) how striping speeds up RAID performance?

While I am asking, I would also be interested in suggestions with regard
to partitions and placements. I have been running 5Gb roots that include
my /var and /home. Most of my "media", including music, video, photos,
and the like I have been keeping on a separate partition that I mount
under /mnt/share. This way I have access to it from whichever root I
boot to, as well as making it publicly readable to my family's logins.
Not much needs to be kept private, and, well, I manage that when need be.

I think it would be unwise for me to make the /home directories be the
same between the two installs (32 and 64-bit). But I am intruiged to
know how far such a notion could be taken. Being able to have
Thunderbird and my GPG keys available no matter which I boot to would be
rather convenient. I could spend more time in 64-bit land. Right now I
must use the 32-bit install for that.

Lastly, since I don't want to tap you all toooo much all at once, I am
curious about this whole "chroot" thing. Since I have both 32 and
64-bit installs, is there a way to make my 32-bit root BE the chroot
under 64-bit? That would totally rock! I have zero experience with this
and am only sort-of understanding how it all works. I would like to,
for instance, just run 64-bit firefox and have it use 32-bit
libflashplayer.so. That, of course, being one of the very few things
keeping me on the 32-bit side 90% of the time when I would much rather
go 64-bit as much as possible. But I have heard that you can't have a
64-bit app call a 32-bit library. Okay. So then 32-bit FF. But then
that also means all the dependencies for FF and for FlashPlayer, right?
Well, then, at what point DO the 64 and 32-bit parts commingle? Would
32-bit FF run on the 64-bit X session? That, I could see. Or is it
some "xnest" type set-up? If it dose run on the display, would it talk
to 64-bit Gnome? What kind of crazy nightmare am I getting myself into
with this chroot thingy? Am I better off sitting in a corner, beating my
head against the wall? Maybe I should stop wasting my time on this and
use it more (!) effectively, writing pleas to Macromedia to get off
their corporate duffs and spend the, what, hour or two it would (should:
can't know with closed-source) take to do the damned port.

Well that's all the time my meter had, and then some. Thanks in advance
for the time to read me and for any help and advice. And apologies for
the cross-posting. You know, I have not seen any "forum guides" of any
sort come down the pike on any of these newsgroups for a few months. So
which Linux newsgroup is good for what sorts of linuxy things I just
don't know. I'd "RTFM" on these newsgroups if I knew where to find it.

Peace!
Morningdew

[J.O. Aho]

Post by Morningdew
I was just curious to know... What are some good rules of thumb for
configuring swap space under Linux? For that matter, are there any
comprehensive guides or articles on the subject? When I used to admin
NT boxes I used to set their "virtual memory" setting to 1.5 times
physical memory, giving 50% over physical as swap. That was just by
convention, or, "rule of thumb". No great scientific methodology, it is
just what had worked for me and my coworkers for so long. Granted,
Linux is different.

Size for swap usually have been given as 1.5 to 2.5 times the size of ram,
everything depending on whom you are talking with and what distro you use. I
have settled for around 2 times the ram size, not that I ever have had more
use than a few MB of the 4GB swap.

Post by Morningdew
Initially I had set up a 32-bit install on one drive, and a
64-bit (AMD64) on the other. I decided to go with my old NT convention
for grins, and give 50% over physical for swap. But since I have both
swap partitions available, I have both the 32 and 64 bit installs using
both swaps, for a nearly 1:1 phys:swap ratio.

One swap is enough, even if you run 32-bit and 64-bit linux, but if you have
heavy usage of swap, then splitting up to more than harddrive can speed the
swap speed.

Post by Morningdew
One consideration, besides size, is location. This question goes beyond
swap space, too. How does Linux like to have it's partitions metered
across multiple drives? Should the root and swap be on different
physical drives or does it matter? If it is better to separate, which
would benefit most from "the faster drive"? Does it actually help to
split the swap amongst partitions on differing drives, similar to (yes,
remotely similar to) how striping speeds up RAID performance?

Today with the hughe RAM, swap is quite rarely used, so you can put it on
slower harddrives or use the end part of the harddrive. I have always set my
swap as the last slice on my harddrives (usually only one harddrive with swap).
Stripping would speed up swap, but you don't need to setup it as raid, IBM had
a quite good article about swap on linux, but sadly I can't find the right
link at the moment.

Post by Morningdew
While I am asking, I would also be interested in suggestions with regard
to partitions and placements. I have been running 5Gb roots that include
my /var and /home. Most of my "media", including music, video, photos,
and the like I have been keeping on a separate partition that I mount
under /mnt/share. This way I have access to it from whichever root I
boot to, as well as making it publicly readable to my family's logins.
Not much needs to be kept private, and, well, I manage that when need be.

I have done differently, I have a fileserver where I have setup a LVM, this
one is up on 360GB at the moment (max out at 2TB), the LVM is my /home and I
share it with NFS to all my computers, so login in you will access all your
files and settings, regadles on which computer you happen to work at.
I have only removeble medias mounted in /mnt (cdrw/dvdrw/zip/mp3/floppy).

Otherwise I have /usr, /usr/src, /tmp and / as own slices, on machine with the
mailserver I have /var/spool/mail too as it's own (don't want big mails to
fill /var and that way block the system).

Post by Morningdew
I think it would be unwise for me to make the /home directories be the
same between the two installs (32 and 64-bit). But I am intruiged to
know how far such a notion could be taken. Being able to have
Thunderbird and my GPG keys available no matter which I boot to would be
rather convenient. I could spend more time in 64-bit land. Right now I
must use the 32-bit install for that.

Why would that be the case? The settings would still be the same for the
applications, regadles if they are compiled as 32 or 64 bit, just waist of
space to have more than one /home.

Post by Morningdew
Lastly, since I don't want to tap you all toooo much all at once, I am
curious about this whole "chroot" thing. Since I have both 32 and
64-bit installs, is there a way to make my 32-bit root BE the chroot
under 64-bit? That would totally rock! I have zero experience with this
and am only sort-of understanding how it all works. I would like to,
for instance, just run 64-bit firefox and have it use 32-bit
libflashplayer.so. That, of course, being one of the very few things
keeping me on the 32-bit side 90% of the time when I would much rather
go 64-bit as much as possible.

I think you may have confused what chroot is, you use it to lock software to
run in a controlled environment.

Post by Morningdew
But I have heard that you can't have a
64-bit app call a 32-bit library. Okay. So then 32-bit FF. But then
that also means all the dependencies for FF and for FlashPlayer, right?
Well, then, at what point DO the 64 and 32-bit parts commingle? Would
32-bit FF run on the 64-bit X session?

People are running neverwinter nights on 64bits systems, so there shouldn't be
problems, you may need a compat library to allow run 32bit stuff in 64bits
environment, I'm not that much into that as I only have 32bits machines.



//Aho

[Morningdew]

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
I was just curious to know... What are some good rules of thumb for
configuring swap space under Linux? For that matter, are there any

Size for swap usually have been given as 1.5 to 2.5 times the size of
ram, everything depending on whom you are talking with and what distro
you use. I have settled for around 2 times the ram size, not that I ever
have had more use than a few MB of the 4GB swap.

Wow, that's completely contradictory to what Paul Sherwin replied with,
which is...

Post by J.O. Aho
There is *no* direct relationship between physical memory and swapfile
size. These rules of thumb originated in the 70s when people had to
commission systems before knowing what the application mix would be.
The idea was that a system with a lot of memory would be used for
memory intensive applications, so should have a lot of swapspace as
well. Some systems also used swapspace to hold a memory dump in the
event of a system crash, so the swap had to be at least as large as
physical memory.
Modern Linux systems with lots of physical memory will almost never
swap, unless you're doing something very unusual. If you find the
system is swapping a lot, you should add more physical memory rather
than fiddling around with swapspace, My main Linux server is currently
using 778k of swapspace, and this is quite typical. Despite this,
people keep configuring gigabytes of swapspace.
You can always add a swap file later, which will keep you going until
you upgrade memory.

But I *am* maxing out so I will definitely run some swap and play it
safe. I am going from 90Gb to 340Gb storage, so I can afford some swap
"just in case". To turn Paul's argument around, I can always cut back
on swap space later.

Post by J.O. Aho
One swap is enough, even if you run 32-bit and 64-bit linux, but if you
have heavy usage of swap, then splitting up to more than harddrive can
speed the swap speed.

Well I'll just play it by ear and see what happens then.

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
One consideration, besides size, is location. This question goes beyond
swap space, too. How does Linux like to have it's partitions metered
across multiple drives? Should the root and swap be on different
physical drives or does it matter? If it is better to separate, which
would benefit most from "the faster drive"? Does it actually help to
split the swap amongst partitions on differing drives, similar to (yes,
remotely similar to) how striping speeds up RAID performance?

Today with the hughe RAM, swap is quite rarely used, so you can put it
on slower harddrives or use the end part of the harddrive. I have always
set my swap as the last slice on my harddrives (usually only one
harddrive with swap).
Stripping would speed up swap, but you don't need to setup it as raid,
IBM had a quite good article about swap on linux, but sadly I can't find
the right link at the moment.

I'll do some googling for it. I am interested in what they'd have to
say for "cranium enhancing" purposes (me like learn stuff).

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
While I am asking, I would also be interested in suggestions with regard
to partitions and placements. I have been running 5Gb roots that include
my /var and /home. Most of my "media", including music, video, photos,
and the like I have been keeping on a separate partition that I mount
under /mnt/share. This way I have access to it from whichever root I
boot to, as well as making it publicly readable to my family's logins.
Not much needs to be kept private, and, well, I manage that when need be.

I have done differently, I have a fileserver where I have setup a LVM,
this one is up on 360GB at the moment (max out at 2TB), the LVM is my
/home and I share it with NFS to all my computers, so login in you will
access all your files and settings, regadles on which computer you
happen to work at.
I have only removeble medias mounted in /mnt (cdrw/dvdrw/zip/mp3/floppy).
Otherwise I have /usr, /usr/src, /tmp and / as own slices, on machine
with the mailserver I have /var/spool/mail too as it's own (don't want
big mails to fill /var and that way block the system).

Thats all cool. I'm not running a home net right now, though I have in
the past. I suppose really much of these decisions depend on how you
intend to use the system. Think for me it is desktop, mostly one user,
with occasional family or guest logins under their own accounts. I will
be connecting up another computer though in maybe a month, when they get
the money together for their final parts to complete the box. I will
share my media and internet connection then. Likely they'll want to run
Windows, so I'll set up myself as an SMB server as I did with my
brothers (who run Win2k desktops). Mainly I ask these partitioning
questions because I want to avoid any hurdles ahead of time, and be
smart about it before I lay it down. Yeah, there are tools to shrink
and expand partitions, and I can copy stuff around a lot with my extra
space (for the time being). But I hope to avoid the later hassles with
good planning up front.

I assume that LVM is Logical Volume Manager or maybe Linux Volume
Management, something like that? I don't know what that is, but I will
look it up.

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
I think it would be unwise for me to make the /home directories be the
same between the two installs (32 and 64-bit). But I am intruiged to
know how far such a notion could be taken. Being able to have
Thunderbird and my GPG keys available no matter which I boot to would be
rather convenient. I could spend more time in 64-bit land. Right now I
must use the 32-bit install for that.

Why would that be the case? The settings would still be the same for the
applications, regadles if they are compiled as 32 or 64 bit, just waist
of space to have more than one /home.

Okay well here is a place where I get concerned, and don't want to mess
things up. I mean, lots of configuration information for my user goes
here, and I don't want to cause confusion for my programs. I guess I am
worrying too much. For the most part I will be trying to keep my app
installs between the two in sync. However, if I do have some
differences between them this is where they'd likely collide, no?

But hey, the real goal is to run as much in 64-bit land as possible.
It's just that a few things (proprietary binaries only released on
32-bit) are holding me back. Once I understand how to "mix" the
environment up, I will abandon a straight 32-bit set-up. That is why I
wrote the following.

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
Lastly, since I don't want to tap you all toooo much all at once, I am
curious about this whole "chroot" thing. Since I have both 32 and
64-bit installs, is there a way to make my 32-bit root BE the chroot
under 64-bit? That would totally rock! I have zero experience with this
and am only sort-of understanding how it all works. I would like to,
for instance, just run 64-bit firefox and have it use 32-bit
libflashplayer.so. That, of course, being one of the very few things
keeping me on the 32-bit side 90% of the time when I would much rather
go 64-bit as much as possible.

I think you may have confused what chroot is, you use it to lock
software to run in a controlled environment.

Actually I do understand that chroot is mainly used to create secure
"jails" But it is being creatively used by 64-bit Linuxers to run
32-bit stuff "in the chroot".

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
But I have heard that you can't have a
64-bit app call a 32-bit library. Okay. So then 32-bit FF. But then
that also means all the dependencies for FF and for FlashPlayer, right?
Well, then, at what point DO the 64 and 32-bit parts commingle? Would
32-bit FF run on the 64-bit X session?

People are running neverwinter nights on 64bits systems, so there
shouldn't be problems, you may need a compat library to allow run 32bit
stuff in 64bits environment, I'm not that much into that as I only have
32bits machines.

Well yes, but how are they going about it? Is chroot involved? I guess
I will leave the chroot questions open for someone with AMD64 mixed
64/32-bit environment experience to comment on. Thanks, though, //Aho,
for your feedback. I'll study up on LVM and do some more research on my
own about partitioning. The 32bit-on-64bit stuff is still a bit
perplexing. But if I could grasp win32 library "thunking layers" on NT
for 9x compatibility and virtual dos machines, etc., I am sure I can
eventually grasp this.

Peace,
Morningdew

[J.O. Aho]

Post by Morningdew

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
I was just curious to know... What are some good rules of thumb for
configuring swap space under Linux? For that matter, are there any

Size for swap usually have been given as 1.5 to 2.5 times the size of
ram, everything depending on whom you are talking with and what distro
you use. I have settled for around 2 times the ram size, not that I
ever have had more use than a few MB of the 4GB swap.

Wow, that's completely contradictory to what Paul Sherwin replied with,
which is...

Post by J.O. Aho
There is *no* direct relationship between physical memory and swapfile
size. These rules of thumb originated in the 70s when people had to
commission systems before knowing what the application mix would be.
The idea was that a system with a lot of memory would be used for
memory intensive applications, so should have a lot of swapspace as
well.

I don't really see any contradiction here, more that are quite on the same
track. In a normal usage, you don't need a hughe swap, but today the cost for
a GB harddrive space is quite low, so you can make a big swap even if you
won't ever be using it completly.

Post by Morningdew
Thats all cool. I'm not running a home net right now, though I have in
the past. I suppose really much of these decisions depend on how you
intend to use the system. Think for me it is desktop, mostly one user,
with occasional family or guest logins under their own accounts.

I'm the main user on my home network, with some family members that may use it
from time to time, but that don't mean I want to configure each machine just
for fun.

This can be taken even futher, to use tftp to boot systems and use nfs to
access filesystems, this way you could have diskless systems, this makes the
coolness level to raise a lot. The coolest home made system I have seen
includes 3 computers, where one serves the other two as file server (nfs) and
boot media (tftp), quite cool IMHO. :)

Post by Morningdew
I assume that LVM is Logical Volume Manager or maybe Linux Volume
Management, something like that? I don't know what that is, but I will
look it up.

It's L as in Logical.

Post by Morningdew
Okay well here is a place where I get concerned, and don't want to mess
things up. I mean, lots of configuration information for my user goes
here, and I don't want to cause confusion for my programs. I guess I am
worrying too much. For the most part I will be trying to keep my app
installs between the two in sync. However, if I do have some
differences between them this is where they'd likely collide, no?

I still haven't seen a program, say gimp that would have completly different
setting if it was compiled for 32bits or 64bits.

Post by Morningdew
But hey, the real goal is to run as much in 64-bit land as possible.
It's just that a few things (proprietary binaries only released on
32-bit) are holding me back. Once I understand how to "mix" the
environment up, I will abandon a straight 32-bit set-up. That is why I
wrote the following.

A hasty checkup, showed that it don't matter that much if you mix 64 and 32
bits programs, as long as the binary and the plugin is of the same bits, so if
you use 32bits plugins for FireFox, then your FireFox must be 32bits too. Xorg
on the other hand could be 64bits, this much resebles of mixed gcc2 and gcc3
environments.
I think this will be well covered at the distros homepages that do supply both
32 and 64 bits versions of their distros.


//Aho

[Morningdew]

(clipped all above here)

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
Wow, that's completely contradictory to what Paul Sherwin replied
with, which is...

Post by J.O. Aho
There is *no* direct relationship between physical memory and swapfile
size. These rules of thumb originated in the 70s when people had to
commission systems before knowing what the application mix would be.
The idea was that a system with a lot of memory would be used for
memory intensive applications, so should have a lot of swapspace as
well.

I don't really see any contradiction here, more that are quite on the
same track. In a normal usage, you don't need a hughe swap, but today
the cost for a GB harddrive space is quite low, so you can make a big
swap even if you won't ever be using it completly.

MY BAD, AHO!!! Oops! I missed a couple paragraphs in the quote from
Paul. It should have coninued with these two paragraphs. The last being
the "argument" I turned around.

Post by J.O. Aho
Modern Linux systems with lots of physical memory will almost never
swap, unless you're doing something very unusual. If you find the
system is swapping a lot, you should add more physical memory rather
than fiddling around with swapspace, My main Linux server is currently
using 778k of swapspace, and this is quite typical. Despite this,
people keep configuring gigabytes of swapspace.
You can always add a swap file later, which will keep you going until
you upgrade memory.

What I got from that is that swap space was mostly not necessary, in
Paul's opinion. He stated that he is actually running some, but only
about 3/4 of a megabyte, as opposed to the approximate 1Gb I have
presently configured. That is like more than a factor or 10 smaller.
He never did say how much RAM he has, but, also according to him, that
is irrelevant.

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
Thats all cool. I'm not running a home net right now, though I have...

(clip)

Post by J.O. Aho
I'm the main user on my home network, with some family members that may
use it from time to time, but that don't mean I want to configure each
machine just for fun.
This can be taken even futher, to use tftp to boot systems and use nfs
to access filesystems, this way you could have diskless systems, this
makes the coolness level to raise a lot. The coolest home made system I
have seen includes 3 computers, where one serves the other two as file
server (nfs) and boot media (tftp), quite cool IMHO. :)

He he... What I was getting at is that there is only the one physical
box up and running here. My brothers moved out and took their boxes
with them. My dad's computer bit the dust, and so my mom's friend gave
her an "old" motherboard but it is actually newer than my dad's, and
uses newer memory also. I cobbled together the other hardware from my
dad's box and the new mobo, but they (my folks) need the cash to get the
ram and a few other odds and ends before it can breathe life. When they
do, I am pretty sure my dad will want to run Windows on it. Mostly
because it's what he knows and does not want to learn something new
after all these years. My mom could care less which OS so long as she
knew where to click to browse and access her bank account websites,
where to click to play Bejeweled (or Gweled on Linux) and a couple other
simple games, like solitaire and majong, and where to click to load
Thunderbird for her email. Beyond that she is completely non-technical
and not likely to ever want to be.

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
I assume that LVM is Logical Volume Manager or maybe Linux Volume
Management, something like that? I don't know what that is, but I
will look it up.

It's L as in Logical.

Thanks. I have not read up on that yet, been distracted. But I saved a
google page in my "to do" bookmark folder so I don't forget. My
intuition tells me that this might be very cool.

Post by J.O. Aho

Post by Morningdew
Okay well here is a place where I get concerned, and don't want to

(clip... Concerns about sharing home directory between roots)

Post by J.O. Aho
I still haven't seen a program, say gimp that would have completly
different setting if it was compiled for 32bits or 64bits.

Post by Morningdew
But hey, the real goal is to run as much in 64-bit land as possible.
It's just that a few things (proprietary binaries only released on
32-bit) are holding me back. Once I understand how to "mix" the
environment up, I will abandon a straight 32-bit set-up. That is why
I wrote the following.

A hasty checkup, showed that it don't matter that much if you mix 64 and
32 bits programs, as long as the binary and the plugin is of the same
bits, so if you use 32bits plugins for FireFox, then your FireFox must
be 32bits too. Xorg on the other hand could be 64bits, this much
resebles of mixed gcc2 and gcc3 environments.
I think this will be well covered at the distros homepages that do
supply both 32 and 64 bits versions of their distros.
//Aho

Yeah, I have been looking some more too. This Athalon64 is really a
very cool chip. I am quite happy I plunked my money on it. I think I
can debbootstrap (or something) my existing 32-bit root and make it be a
chroot for the 64-bit install. I don't know. I think I am going to
just dive right in and play with this until I get something that works
for me. Sometimes the best way to learn is to get your hands all dirty!

Thanks again Aho!

-~Mornindgew~-

[Paul Sherwin]

Post by Morningdew
To turn Paul's argument around, I can always cut back
on swap space later.

This is difficult if you configure a big swap partition. Sure, you can
delete the swap partition and create a smaller one, but that leaves
you with a chunk of free disk space. All you can do with this without
repartitioning the whole disk is to create another small filesystem
partition in it, which isn't much use.

A swap file is much more flexible, but most people prefer a partition
because there's less overhead.

Best regards, Paul
--
Paul Sherwin Consulting http://paulsherwin.co.uk

[J.O. Aho]

Post by Paul Sherwin

Post by Morningdew
To turn Paul's argument around, I can always cut back
on swap space later.

This is difficult if you configure a big swap partition. Sure, you can
delete the swap partition and create a smaller one, but that leaves
you with a chunk of free disk space. All you can do with this without
repartitioning the whole disk is to create another small filesystem
partition in it, which isn't much use.

The most commonly used filesystem, ext3 do allow adjusting slice sices, if you
would create a big swap and then decide to cut it down to half (or what ever),
you can still assign the "free" space to the slice before/after and grow that
filesystem.

Post by Paul Sherwin
A swap file is much more flexible, but most people prefer a partition
because there's less overhead.

swapfile is slower too and in ms-world one of the main reasons for the
fragmenation of the filesystem and overall system slowness.


//Aho

[Morningdew]

Post by Paul Sherwin

Post by Morningdew
To turn Paul's argument around, I can always cut back
on swap space later.

This is difficult if you configure a big swap partition. Sure, you can
delete the swap partition and create a smaller one, but that leaves
you with a chunk of free disk space. All you can do with this without
repartitioning the whole disk is to create another small filesystem
partition in it, which isn't much use.
A swap file is much more flexible, but most people prefer a partition
because there's less overhead.
Best regards, Paul
--
Paul Sherwin Consulting http://paulsherwin.co.uk

Thanks, Paul. Here is what I was thinking:

250Gb SATA drive "Data Drive"
=================================
- 250Gb (ext3)

Basically all of it used for "commons" space. Data / media store,
programming projects, what have you. It's my playground. Only real
question I have for myself is whether to house the /home directories on
this partition too, sharing them between roots, or to leave separate
/home directories in under the roots.

60Gb IDE drive "Linux OS Drive"
=================================
- 10Gb Ubuntu 64-bit root (ext3)
- 10Gb Ubuntu 32-bit root (ext3)
- 28Gb free for experiments
- 2Gb (swap)

The deal is that the Swap will be at the end, and can easily shrink (or
grow, heaven forbid) after I get a "real-world" feel for it. The
experimnetal 28Gb will be for a 5Gb distro test or two, depending, and
maybe a chunk here or there for experimental websites and content
management systems like Mambo, Typo3, Movable Type, phpBB, etc. Call it
my own little lab. I am also thinking of participating in the Freenode
Project (http://freenetproject.org/) as a node, which means sharing some
of my storage with the community. We'll see how that goes. I am very
much in favor of supporting community projects like this. The majority
of my media will also be available on p2p. Most of it consists of
freely tradable concert recordings like Grateful Dead shows (and several
other bands too!), stuff like that.

If I wind up putting my /home directories on the 250Gb drive and sharing
them between the distros, I may cut back the Ubuntu roots to 5Gb each
and leave more for experiments and projects. I will read about LVM and
scour the web a little more before deciding for sure. Aho seems to
think I'll have no problems with shared /home.

30Gb IDE drive "Windows OS Drive"
=================================
- 8Gb Win2k install (NTFS)
- 22Gb (FAT32 ) for game data

This is for any game I may have but not be able to get to run in Linux
via Cedega/Wine. Hopefully these will be few, or something I won't care
about. Linux has Doom3 and UT2004, but there is so much more on the
Windows platform. Alas. Other than gaming, Win2k is there just in case
I ever want to test something for whatever reason, like stuff I write in
Java or web-stuff I need to test against IE (yeech!). I am actually very
reluctant to put Windows on my box. Bristles my feathers... The goal
is to boot Win2K as infrequently as possible. I will make the game data
partition as FAT32 so I can read/write data from Linux safely, should I
want to move anything between the OS's. Even for the games I get to
work under Linux via Cedega/Wine, I will still store their data in this
partition. Call it the "Game Drive" I guess.
---------------------------------

Thanks both of you, Paul and Aho, who have replied to me on the OP.

.^//\/Morningdew\//\^..

[Paul Sherwin]

On , Morningdew <***@spam.free> wrote:
[lots of stuff]

It's true that you shouldn't worry too much about allocating 1gb or
2gb to swap if you have huge amounts of free disk space available. It
always helps to understand what's going on, though. By all means use
lots of space for swap if you're in any way concerned, but I bet you
find you never use more than a couple of megs :-)

Best regards, Paul

--
Paul Sherwin Consulting http://paulsherwin.co.uk