I have a new clean HDD in my laptop on which I want to install Ubuntu 11.10. So, as I have very less (in fact nothing) knowledge on Linux File System hierarchy, I thought some would be helping me to choose the best one.
Here is what I briefly do on Ubuntu.
- Learn programming (should maintain my project files) # I am a student.
(Sometimes, I had to install few external packages too. Though they never were more than 200 MB each) - I use software's like Matlab, Netbeans, Eclipse etc.
- Store lots of music, movies, photos
- I have a good set of ebooks, office documents (includes documentations of packages).
- Download many files..
This is what a normal user would probably do.
What I am actually searching for is that, how do I maintain all those file if I have created only 2 partitions "/" and "/home". Of course, all of these would come under "/home". Wouldn't they look messy??
I windows, I could create 4 partitions, each of them I use for different purposes.
Actually, I have gone through Ubuntu Linux File System hierarchy and got to know that each directory has some special significance. Thus each directory should be used for their respective purposes (as recommended).
So, I want to know how should I partition my HDD and what directories should I mount them to those partitions and what kind of files should I place in them.
Best Answer
The good thing about Ubuntu is you really don't need to worry about disk partitions. If you are a normal user, and from your description, you are, you can go with the defaults quite happily, unless you have a burning desire to mess around, or if you have something which could increase in size in such a way as to fill up a partition (eg logging very verbose logs into /home could end up filling it and causing you problems, so doing that is generally not recommended)
Filesystems under unixes are not messy once you understand the structure - it is actually much more straightforward than Windows, for example.
You can of course move any part of your filesystem wherever you want - I tend to have my main music store (an external terabyte disk) mounted at /home/music but I could have put it anywhere.
Default under Ubuntu: Two partitions
Common alternative: Three partitions