Arch Linux

muze

Member

From: Columbus, OH

Registered: 2009-10-07

Posts: 1

Sharing the /home partition and general partition questions

Hello, I'm new to Arch, but have been using Linux for a few years (albeit still at a beginner level).  I'm going to be reinstalling Arch on an old computer that has a 40GB main drive so dual boot a "operational" OS for day to day stuff that I want to make sure will be running well and then another OS that I can test on or just have for trying new distros.  I also have an 80GB that I'll use for data (but I don't think I want that to be my home drive). 

My question is:  If I have two different installations of Arch, (or a second distribution) should they share the same /home partition?  My thought is "no", but I didn't know.

Also, I'm planning on splitting the 40GB drive the following partitions.  Do these make sense, or would there be a better way to do this? 

5GB = / (OS #1)
14.5GB = /home (OS #1)
5GB = / (OS #2)
14.5GB = /home (OS #2)
1 GB = swap (both OSes)

I have an ancient P4 w/ 512 of RAM.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

Website

Re: Sharing the /home partition and general partition questions

As to your first question, I don't see a problem with sharing home dirs.  You can run into issues if you're dual booting w/ two different Linux flavors that are using different versions of software.  I dunno how likely that is though.

Your 2nd question: I would give root (/) more than 5 GB personally (15 should be plenty but you are pressed for space).  Remember that ext4/ext3 filesystems in general like to have SOME freespace to avoid fragmentation.  I read somewhere that 80 % use is the max you wanna go in order to keep things nice and tidy.

/sda1 (root #1) 10 GB
/sda2 (root #2) 10 GB
/sda3 (/boot) 100 MB
/sda4 (EXTENDED PARTITION)
/sda5 (/home) 18.9
/sda6 (swap) 1 GB

I like having a dedicated /boot that I manually manage, but that's just me.  Also, your HDD is 40 gig unformatted so it'll probably format to 30-something therefore those numbers are approximate.

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ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: Sharing the /home partition and general partition questions

home dir contains your program settings. If you're installing two different distros with different software versions, you WILL have breakage after using the newer one if the settings format has changed. If you don't mind manually handling stuff, I keep a shared home with two different usernames and symlink things I want shared (like .fonts, .evolution, .mozilla).

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Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: Sharing the /home partition and general partition questions

sharing /home drives would NOT be a good option in your case simply because you are going to use the 2nd OS as test/trials. Those other OSes may have different ways of storing config files etc which may lead to having a lot of junk to parse through. and if you ever use any configs for the Test OS, and they are somewhat in conflict with Arch - in any way - you might end up having to re-configure settings for your favorite apps in Arch.

I have a 30 GB HDD on a 10 yr old laptop which has Arch. This is the partition scheme I have

╔═[16:10]═[inxs @ arch]
╚═══===═══[~]>> df 
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3     ext3    7.0G  1.7G  5.0G  25% /
none         tmpfs    125M  100K  125M   1% /dev
none         tmpfs    125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda4     ext4     16G  850M   14G   6% /home
/dev/sda6 reiserfs    5.1G  558M  4.5G  11% /var
/dev/sda1     ext2     61M   12M   47M  20% /boot

╔═[21:16]═[inxs @ arch]
╚═══===═══[~]>> fdisk

Disk /dev/sda: 30.0 GB, 30005821440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3648 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           8       64228+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2               9         726     5767335    5  Extended
/dev/sda3             727        1640     7341705   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            1641        3648    16129260   83  Linux
/dev/sda5               9          73      522081   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6              74         726     5245191   83  Linux

╔═[21:18]═[inxs @ arch]
╚═══===═══[~]>>

Since you have 10GB more than I do, you can adjust accordingly and make partitions for your test OSes as well.

Last edited by Inxsible (2009-10-08 01:22:30)

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