It can get confusing when manually making partitions and mount points as to what should be assigned to where, but it is fairly straightforward to do.
Below is an illustration of a typical directory tree for a Linux system.
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| Linux Directory Tree |
It does not matter where a directory is in a hierarchy, it can still be mounted according to taste and below is an example of partitioning and mounting a 250GB Hard Drive.(Approximate values)
/boot 800MB ext4
swap 2200MB swap
/ 20,000MB ext4
/home 215,000MB ext4
You can see that the home directory is mounted to a much larger space than others as it is likely to contain more users whereas the top '/' of the tree typically just has a root directory so does not require as much space.
The above is if we are using standard file-system types as opposed to the Logical Volume Groups. Below are some points to remember about the Linux operating system.
- Linux is case-sensitive whereas Windows is not.
- Linux files and directories have ownership permissions.
- Linux is a multi user network operating system.
- Desktop users usually can not change system settings unless they know the root password.
- Linux partitions are ext3 or 4 files system (usually).
- Linux path names contain forward slash characters as opposed to Windows which have back slashes.Examples are a Linux path /usr/bin and a Windows path C:\mysql\bin
Linux does not have any drive letters.
See also an analysis of the individual directories. Labels: Centos 6, Directory tree, Partitions, RHEL