[plug] Help

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 09:54:30PM +1100, Onno Benschop wrote:

| First the bad news: Before you do anything, I'd *strongly* recommend
| that you backup your machine, the data on it will be lost if you get
| this wrong...

Good advice, but often impractical :-(  Hard drive capacities always
seem to be several jumps ahead of any affordable backup system (besides
buying more hard drives :-P).

| 	1 of 2 x RAM (type swap)

I've heard this guideline quoted quite a bit.  I'd say that it depends a
lot on what you're using the machine for and how much RAM you have.  For
a typical 'desktop' system, I wouldn't bother with more than 500MB of
swap or perhaps even a lot less - if you're using up that much swap then
the system will probably be clogged up and slow enough to be unusable.

| 	1 of 16Mb (boot)
| 	1 of 5Gb (root)
| 	1 of the rest (home)

All sensible suggestions :-)  You probably don't need a separate /boot
partition though.  The main reason to have a boot partition, AFAIK, is
so that you can use large hard drives on older machines, where the BIOS
doesn't recognise the whole drive and is unable to boot from a partition
located towards the end of the drive.  The precise values of "older
machines" and "larger drives" keep changing: at one point it was 500MB
drives on 486es, then 8GB drives on early Pentiums, and more recently
32GB and 128GB have become 'magic' thresholds.

Cameron.