[ILUG] More partitions for Linux? (/opt)

[Michael Conry]

With regard to /opt, my SuSE handbook gives some advice, which I will paraphrase here:

the /opt  partition is used by some (mostly commercial) programs to store their data.
It is then recommended to make a partition /opt, or to make your root partition big
enough to accommodate it. Some info is also given on disk usage in /opt by various
packages (all figures in Mb):

KDE           170
GNOME         100
htdig           5
Fortify         2
dochost       200
Wabu           10
Netscape       35
Arcad         350
Applixware    400
Eagle          18
Staroffice    150
Cyberscheduler Software 30
Cygnus Source Navigator 20
SNiFF+         45
Insure++       45
pep            18
Oracle 8      400
Sybase        170
virtuoso       55

These are presumably the packages in SuSE using /opt (Although I notice that Acrobat
is not mentioned). Anyway, the total is 2173 Mb, but you are unlikely to use all of
these packages. 4Gb seems excessive, 2 would probably be more than sufficient.

Hope this info helps some
mick

John Gay wrote

>
> Thanks for the reply. The reasoning for /opt was, StarOffice wanted to install
> into /opt rather than /usr. I thought this was strange, but the FHS was not very
> particular on this. Also, Acrobat reader also installed itself into /opt, so I
> figured I should leave some room for such large programmes. The reason I wanted
> to take several steps, was so I could take my time and try to understand what I
> was doing. I've grown-up with MSDOS and Windows. All this UNIX type stuff is new
> to me.
>
> At the moment I have:
>
> hda 6G hard drive
> hda1 2G for WindowsNT
> hda2 100M for /
> hda3 64M for swap
> hda5 1G for /home
> hda6 2G for /usr
>
> hdb 13G hard drive has been partitioned, but except for the two CD partitions,
> is not being used yet.
>
> I want to change this to:
>
> hda1 2G for WindowsNT, untouched
> hda2 500M for /, I've heard that StarOffice uses large /tmp files
> hda3 64M swap, this will have to move, but It's More than I've needed in most
> cases.
> hda5 3.5G for /home
>
> hdb1 4G for /usr
> hdb2 4G for /var
> hdb3 4G for /opt
> hdb5&6, 800M each for CD images.
>
> /opt should be rather easy, I don't think I've actually installed anything there
> except Acrobat, and I can just re-install that after I change fstab to point to
> it.
>