When installing a machine, you can take the defaults or set up your disk(s) practically any way you want. Here is a brief review of partitions and filesystems. A typical Linux system usually has at least three separate partitions. They are labelled /
, /boot
, and swap
. The /
(pronounced root) is the parent of the directory structure. /boot
is where the system kernel and map files reside. The swap
partition is used when parts of memory need to be moved to the hard drive because of over-commitment. This is called being swapped out to disk.
The following are usually on separate partitions:
/
: It is the parent directory/boot
: The boot and map files are located in here(swap)
: It signifies the swap space
The following are traditionally on a separate partition, but do not have to be:
/home
/tmp
/etc
/var
Here is a partial list of the filesystems and directories and their general use, that are normally present on a Linux system. This is taken from Fedora 17 64-bit: