Ubuntu Documentation

Partitioning in Ubuntu before installation

Asked by Mikhail

I have followed the insctructions abount partioning the hard drive before installation given on https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/directory-tree.html and it seems that 250 MB is not enough for ubuntu root partition, because I couldn't upgrade the kernel after ubuntu is installed. At the same time I have enough space for /var (3 GB), /usr (4 GB) and /tmp (100 MB)

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W. Prins
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Best W. Prins (wprins) said : 		#1

Hmm, I think that documentation needs to be updated a bit or at least have a few caveats noted down. You can probably get away with such a small / partition (e.g. 256MB), but then you *must* make sure you mount other partitions with more space on any other subtree with significant size requirements/that and/or that might grow is not stored on the root partition (e.g. then you should probably have a seperate boot partition as well.)

Personally I'd recommend keeping to the simpler setup of:
/boot: optional, make it about 200MB (or leave it out completely, leaving the boot files by implication on root partition)
(swap): Depends on how much RAM you have. The more RAM the less swap. Finger in the wind value: 512MB. You can always add swap later, onto a file. (So you don't *have* to swap to a partition if you don't want to.)
/ (root): 5 - 15GB depending on how many apps you want to install
/home: The rest of your diskspace

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Mikhail (mikhail-budylin) said : 		#2

Thanks W. Prins, that solved my question.