11.04 size on a AMD64

[Ghion]

Hello everybody. After a few weeks of trying i got into this situation. (Bought a CD from pctech101.com). On AMD 2x64. Installer doesn't let me make a / partition less than 2.6 GB. Last time i had /, swap and /usr partitions and a few others and i choose installation on /usr. The installer put 384 MB on / and 1.7 GB on /usr. But after running updates manager i have 680 or somethin on / and the same on /usr. After installing nvidia driver i ended up with 744 MB on / and 1.7 GB on /usr. The funny part is if i open system monitor, the processors show an average of 5% activity while doing nothing and a memory occupancy of 362 MB. Feeling frustrated, it's been 3 month since the release of 11.04 and updates doubled the size of my OS. Feels like Windows. Help.

[lemonchicken]

I wouldn't advise installing on a partition any less than 10gb..

[coffeecat]

The updates are not doubling the size of your OS. The few hundred MB increase in what is stored in your root partition (without /usr) can be entirely explained by cached deb packages in /var/cache/apt/archives. Consider that much of the OS sits in folders in /usr.

Anyway, why are you making life difficult for yourself by having a separate /usr partition? That only makes sense for complex server setups. I suggest you do what most of us do with desktop installations, a swap partition and everything on a root partition with or without a separate /home partition.

5% CPU activity seems about right and memory usage of 362MB is quite small. You can't have many apps running.

[Ghion]

The updates are not doubling the size of your OS. The few hundred MB increase in what is stored in your root partition (without /usr) can be entirely explained by cached deb packages in /var/cache/apt/archives. Consider that much of the OS sits in folders in /usr.

Anyway, why are you making life difficult for yourself by having a separate /usr partition? That only makes sense for complex server setups. I suggest you do what most of us do with desktop installations, a swap partition and everything on a root partition with or without a separate /home partition.

5% CPU activity seems about right and memory usage of 362MB is quite small. You can't have many apps running.
The reason i think it was doubling the OS is because i was watching updates manager while updating, it selected 167 MB and downloaded 159. I saw flashing in front of my eyes all the major parts of my operating system. Like for Mozilla, it took like 10 seconds. I saw words like updating gnome, nautilus, can't remember exactly, every single bit of my OS. I'm glad i did that, i saw that reccomandation on a forum, and i could see exactly that my OS is a few hundreds MB only and it sits on root. And by the way, the more partitions i made, the less space it took, the first time when i made swap, boot, and root, it took 3.7 GB, when i added home, 2.7 and now wiht usr 1.7 in usr, 744 in root and one hundred something in home. Since update didn't touch usr, i assumed all my updates went to root, where the OS must be. And now it's double in size.

[Ghion]

How about this? http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/disk-partitioning.html

[Ghion]

And by the ways, system monitor/file systems is a great tool for following in real time the increase of partitions while updating with updates manager. All the activity was on root.

[Ghion]

OK. I made a var partition and tried two different things. First without usr 1.9 GB went on root, 136 MB on var. The /root/usr directory was 1.3 GB. Then i added a usr but chose root for installation. It put 272 MB on root the same on var and 1.7 on usr. Can anyone tell me if it this partitioning scheme is a security risk?

I like this because all of the programs installed subsequently go on usr. Is the root partition somehow more protected?

Anyways, the total amount of disk used is a little bit under 2 GB.