[tlinux-users:07505] Re: Anybody have any luck with....

> >I heard of "twice the RAM" to be allocated for swap as a thumbs rule.
> >
> 
> That was true in the days when ram was very expensive and a "well 
> equipped" machine would ship 32
> ...
> 
> >Can you explain where you locate the "efficiency of the system and its
> > ...
> >
> The best way to understand the concept is to look at Microsoft which 
> ...
> lower seek times available in Linux.

Y'all seem to have a good sence of strategies for partitioning.  I'd like to expand this question a little.

First, I too am from the days of twice the ram, hense the 4GB since I plan on having 2GB physical in the system by Wednesday.

However, what I've decided to do is install OpenSUSE 10.0, which doesn't have the Grub problems that Debian has by the way, and use this as a host OS for VMWare.  I considered the SUSE VM solution, but as I already have a VMWare license, I'm going with VMWare 5.5.

The base install on my laptop will be intended almost exclusively as the host for VM instances.  I can then run SUSE, Debian, Windows XP, Solaris 10, or anything else that strikes my fancy.  Further, there's a neat little Browser VM that VMWare puts out that allows me to browse the internet without serious risk of rootkit or virus intrusion on the system (yea, yea... there's lots of other security tweaks I'll have to do, and I'm planning on all that too).

Anyway, the question then becomes, what's the best partition strategy for a system that's intented to be a VMWare host?

I'm thinking of a 3GB /var so I can better manage the logs and prevent them from consuming massive amounts of disk, a 4GB swap (I may yet bring this down to 512MB), and the reamainder as / (root).  I'll have the VM instances in /home and maybe even mounted off of the USB drive.

As for my previous (rather general) partitioning strategy, setting volumes to be mounted as /tmp and /var help me keep these trees from consuming unreasonable amounts of space, having a fixed size /home is a habit again having to do with storage management (but I like the distro idea too), and having a small /boot alows me to store boot management (grub) files in a small space at the very start of the disk (I used to do a lot of dual booting but now prefer the VM option).  I also used to do primarilly server configs rather than a laptop config, so my old strategy may have not real merit as far as this conversation goes.

Thanks again for further consideration.