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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.
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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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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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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)
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !
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